On Nov 1, 2006, at 11:55 AM, James Graham wrote:
...
To take a slight detour into the (hopefully not too) abstract, what do
people think the fundamental point of semantics in HTML is?
To maximize the utility (usefulness) of documents using it. But this is
a complicated function.
* Less presentational -> more medium-independent -> accessible to more
people -> greater utility. (Examples: people using screenreaders or
search engines.)
* More semantic -> harder to learn and understand -> fewer documents
using it -> less utility. (Example: DocBook.)
* More semantic -> harder to learn -> simpler alternatives invented
-> learning and/or transcoding-to-HTML effort required -> less
utility. (Examples: Markdown, BBCode, the various
partly-incompatible wiki syntaxes, and any Web comment form that
allows -- or doesn't convey whether it allows -- a subset of HTML.)
* More semantic -> more machine-analyzable -> greater utility.
(Examples: Google's PageRank with <a>, Google Sets with <ul>.)
* Less presentational -> more semantically-misused -> less
machine-analyzable -> less utility. (Example: XHTML2's attempt to
kill <b> and <i>, resulting in more misuse of <strong> and <em>.)
Many people concentrate on one or two of these effects and gloss over
the others, so their idea of the overall utility function is warped.
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
