Hello, semantic-XHTML-CSS-stucked guyes. This is what I think you need to do:

- study philosophy, and learn what are objective reality (semantic) and its human reflection are all about;

- study what “process” (at all and in appliance to web/UI/software development) is, and what are the entities involved. You don’t design layers and rectangles in photoshop (old way) or markup your page in XHTML and position divs with CSS (new way). You define (with whatever tool or technology) the page semantic (what objective reality does page contain), maybe its structure (though reality is not structured in itself; it is human beings to structure it to be able to reflect it with limited non-multidimensional brain), and present this reality via UI;

- understand, that XHTML/CSS is not that big as it seems and not a revolution (don’t know how it is “shuher” in English), and not about improving semantics (maybe make page structure visible with nested divs), but just newly introduced convenient shortcut (Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V:) to develop web UI, only a tool; but the process/entities (to those who got The Knowledge) not changed. You really don’t grasp what are semantic (web) is. One thing here is that improved semantic means “semantic can be extracted from this page and be used some way”. Is changing tables to divs about extracting semantics? No. RDF/OWL yes. But XHTML/CSS are about more straightforward way to implement designed page structures (with whatever tool; with a sheet of paper) and more convenient way to change visual aspects later. Maybe a thing to be a candidate for good semantic/presentation separation is pure XML/XSL; though in XML/XSL you cannot give a definite answer where to put that decorative GIF as well.

- see that distinguishing semantic (objective reality) and its presentation (the way to reflect) is not an easy task, and in most cases cannot be definitely solved. It goes to Socrat. And that a project with perfect semantic/presentation separation would break any reasonable budget. “We should be using semantically correct markup”. Go on:)

- read at least W3C materials on semantic web and ontologies. Guyes, you here want to be the one to find that big thing, be creative, invent “emergent markup languages”, but don’t want to take a look at what has been researched and done before, in areas such as knowledge representation etc. And end up producing bulks of text in your blogs.

Excellent comments are #8, #19. #12 is good except for the word “semantic”. #17 is interesting – can it be done?

Having semantic defined as in #10 we have nothing to talk about, because semantic is built-in in XHTML in this case: compliance to XHTML (which says to use <p> for paragraph) _is_ being semantically correct that way. Semantic in its common meaning as “objective reality” has no relation to XHTML/CSS.

Sorry, bored.

Also have a good knowledge in linguistic, it would let you mark all those words, phrases correctly increasing semantics on a page.

Just because a minority of new designers choose to learn design first and correct markup second doesn’t mean the tool is inadequate.

That said, I wholeheartedly agree that once introduced to the wonders of valid markup and CSS, one is guided into semantic markup by default.

I spend a lot of time writing code that most be understandable by people who have only just entered the world of HTML and have never seen CSS before.

Logical markup almost always equals semantic markup.

I’m looking forward to the day of all web viewing tools (browsers, feedreaders, whatever) stop pushing their proprietry formats and the world can begin using tools that render code to an agreed standards.

One can dream.

*Note on my email address: yes it’s real and it works. I use ‘sitenameIpostedthison’ @ my domain to ensure I know where spam harvesters are getting my details from – that is all.

Thanks

Consider this page: you use classes like header, pageheader, entry etc. If these were standardised (i.e. all sites used the same classes) then we could start getting some benefit from xhtml – you could pull entries from multiple sites and easily aggregate them. But of course we can do all this *already* with databases, RSS, CMS etc. So what are the benefits of xhtml over html?

As it is, xhtml is totally pointless, and discussing semantics in the context of headings, paras etc completely missing the point. Just my 0.2c ;)

If all non-semantic markup was stripped from the standard, then the connection between standards and semantics would truly exist.

#div2 {
left: #div1.top + 5px;
}

If something similar gets into CSS3 i predict the end of non-semantic tables, spacers, and other anomalies.

A certain very large firm (VLF) has design standards for it’s very large intranet. Nothing can be deployed unless standards compliant. Those standards are based on a 1999 design wherin all structural markup was sacrificed on the altar of SPAN. (Altar installed by a prominent NYC agency.)

Today a colleague comes back from a deployment review moaning, “They say the h1 is non-compliant, that I have to use span, that no one else uses h1, and if I insist, we need to write an exception request.”

BTW, VLF is indeed very large, in the computer industry, with revenues over … ooops if I tell you any more, you’ll know who it is.

Using structural tags like <hn>’s, <ul>’s, <p>’s and all the others helps your code be a) more semantically (I hope its a word too) pure, b) more easily accessible via screen-readers and alternate display devices, and c) closer to standards-compliance if you do it right.

I’m really excited about where this entire industry is going. It seems as though all of these similar disciplines are merging, and pretty soon every designer will be thinking about structural well-formedness just as they thought about colspan attributes in years past.

Let’s hope that browsers evolve with us :)

One thing that’s going on is that the developers and designers that are drawn to create sites that use valid XHTML/CSS right now (like me, though you can’t tell from my site) are also interested in accessibility and (partly through the accessibility angle) semantic markup. To me writing semantic markup means it will look good in Lynx — the page has intrinsic structure that can be discerned without the help of all the associated stylesheets and scripts.

Personally, I think the door to sell semantic markup to new folks is through issues of accessibility and usability on other devices… I think that Jason’s right in his message about evangelism — standards are great, and this other thing called semantic markup is great too, and look, they work together!

Standard compliant XHTML *lends* itself to semantic markup

That’s the direction I was trying to go. Yes they’re separate, but I believe the two often tend to go together (eventually, if not right away).

By the way, did anyone else notice the way Kottke’s post title got truncated to 12 characters in the archive filename?

Standards Do

Interesting.

Exactly. It is very hard to write semantically correct markup that is not valid HTML of any dialect except for misuse, abuse or misunderstanding the tag syntax.

There needs to be a distiction between semantics and validation, because only then can we explain better how to make them work together.

Standard compliant XHTML lends itself to semantic markup, and perhaps, you might say that semantics is inherent in CSS. But semantics can be subjective by nature and must be applied to the document. As you said above, valid XHTML can be a semantic “pile of junk”. In the end, it is up to the author to apply semantics to whatever she/he has written and that, itself, will depend upon the purpose of the code. I think the beauty of CSS and XHTML is that they invisibly encourage people to write more meaningful markup – it is easier to read by eye, easier to write (coming from someone new to coding), etc.

I liked Jason’s point of view if only because it seemed to give a more precise definition between the two subjects. A little more understanding; a bit better grasp on what it is I am doing.

For many designers, (myself included), building sites is rapidly becoming an engineering task, with many disciplines to master, rather than the ‘artistic’ field it once was, and this is forcing us to think in ways which sometimes don’t come naturally to the (alright, my) creative mind. This is a good thing, as others have said, as we consider our work more carefully.

Furthermore, I suspect that, (and I haven’t, but should write it up – apologies), that there are is a limited set whereby all of the guidelines, standards, best practices, methods, optimisations and rules intersect.
For example, some CSS layout techniques are not viable if you wish to place your primary content at the top of the document, say as a search engine optimisation.

If I’m right, then there’s no reason why tools like Dreamweaver, (in a generation or two’s time), can’t construct documents in a satisfactorary and compliant fashion for the majority of users, who aren’t familiar with the innards of markup languages. Tools like DW are good when generating output limited to a small set of options. I’ve scribbled the process and what I think the options are down, it’s halfway to a wizard already.

I agree with Jason’s last point (evangelize etc), but it’ll take effort and some bravery to increase a clients expectations before a project even starts, or educate those who haven’t the time or inclination to listen. I mean, has he honestly never seen/noticed a clients’ eyes glaze over?

Semantically well formedness (is that a word?) is just another element of building a competitive, successful site. Either we all write about how to do it well, or we keep it to ourselves and (ahem) earn more bucks by building better sites. No comments on Jason’s site – so I’ll say it here instead – put up or shut up, eh? Moaning about it doesn’t help anyone.

Maybe the focus will move to semantics soon, once standards are well, standard.

Just like many-many others in this business, I have learned a ton about creating standards compliant xhtml/css sites from the likes of doug, zeldman, dan, eric, and dave (among others). Personally I have found that with most of their articles it is definatley implied (if not out right preached) that we should be using semantically correct markup. Actually, just last week I fought with a complex definition list for almost a full day in order to get it styled correctly and keep it more semantically meaningful.

That being said…keep up the good work doug. This community needs more teachers that are doing it like you guys.