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Around 4-5 years ago, my daily knowledge building and socializing activities went like – read books, attend some sessions/training, visit a friend’s place, engage in a constructive debate, take a walk @ the nearby park … and so on . But years later … the scenario is slowly changing and I hardly find any time doing at least a few of the items listed above, and a lot more additional items have creeped in to the list!

The technology has taken over, and the collective wisdom of humanity, is slowly getting harnessed onto the most powerful medium today – the WEB ! Kids are more concerned about making more friends on their favorite social-networking site than friends at school / college, we talk through comments and write on walls (I would’ve been happier, if we burn that much calorie to write on an actual wall … but this is something else J). The internet is slowly becoming a part of daily life now.

Imagine a day, when you could gather all the data that you would need, fetched from the millions of servers on the web, custom tailored to fit into your global profile page, without needing to go searching deeply into the fathoms of the complex web traffic. Yes, that is where the web is heading towards, and that day will be called – ‘The day of Semantic Web’, and the most important players in that era will be none other than our old kid ‘HTML’ and the relatively sophisticated kid ‘Semantics’.

I plan to throw light on the relationship between these 2, from a web developer’s point of view.

What is ‘SEMANTICS’?

Wikipedia, says - ‘Semantics (from Greek  – semantikos) is the study of meaning, usually in language’. Relating this to the internet, semantics is the study of meaning of data, ie, it is the study of the concept which makes a machine, understand what type of data it is dealing with (as far as web is concerned, the ‘machine’ can be the browser, or any program / code, that deals with the data).

Example: A page may contain, a group of data, which are related to each other, like the steps to be taken to accomplish a task. There may be a tabular data, which comprehends the details of a product, its configurations and price details. There may be a date on which a particular document was created … and the list goes on and on.  In order to make those content / data meaningful to the machines, we need to follow some global guidelines, while creating them,  which entitles the data to be a particular type or the other. Streamlining the data like this would make it really easier to make the data ‘machine readable’ and this is the first step towards efficient data segregation and relation.

For instance, how would it feel like, if you are able to aggregate all the data available about a new gadget that you are planning to buy – the pricing, reviews, configuration, features  everything displayed in a single page, fetched from millions of machine readable data available over the web !

This exactly is the future of web, and the search god ‘Google’, is already relying on such search features, which would make them ‘uber-god’ of the search engine world!

How is HTML related to ‘Semantics’?

Since, a browser is the primary interface enabling the user to get connected to the internet (computer screen, mobile screen, TV, Projector are all different medias, but ultimately, all these needs a browser to download the page locally and view the contents), and there is only one way, with which content can be displayed in a browser – which is the ‘HTML’ way. So, HTML holds the major stake, in determining the way, data has to be displayed on a page, and the ‘tags’ used in rendering the output as HTML, to a browser determines the meaningfulness of the data contained. This is important, because a particular data/content can be rendered, using more than one HTML tag.

The page/content is said to be meaningfully rendered, or said to be ‘semantically correct’, if those are rendered using tags which represent the correct meaning of the data. Eg.  A date rendered in a tag, a quote rendered in a tag, a label rendered in a tag etcetra.

Find below, the ‘semantics’ of a few HTML tags

(courtesy: htmlplayground)

Why Semantics?

The actual advantages of sticking to semantically correct HTML are numerous. Here are a few of them …

Search Engine Optimization

With the advent of web, information is money, and getting the right information which you look for, at the right time is more important, since no body wants to waste time searching for an information too long. Here comes the era of search engines, and the key here is to make the data / content in your piece of land on the web, appear in a decent position of SERP (Search Engine Result Pages). Using semantically correct code means that your page is easy to read for the machines, and ‘search engine robots’ are nothing else, but machines / programs of search engines J. So, semantically correctly coded pages stands a better chance to appear on top of SERPs.

Scalability / Flexibility

Updating the pages, which are semantically well coded, is a pleasure! Since each sections are coded using the relevant tags, a change in style for the element can be done in the updation of CSS selector for that particular tag and markup level changes can also be done seamlessly.

Accessibility

There are visually impaired users using the internet, and they might use a screen reader to read out the contents aloud. These screen readers are programs (machines in our terminology J)which reads the content of the page, by trying to understand the meaning of the data represented.

There is not a better way to make things easier for these programs to understand the content of the page, than  using a semantically well coded page ?

Cleaner and shorter code

Semantically correct page means, a clean and crisper code, which also means lightweight stuff for the browser to load !

‘The pursuit of Semantic Wellness’ – some practical insights

The pursuit to achieve ‘semantic wellness’, never ends! Every time you code a page, and assume it to be the semantically perfect markup ever, there comes another better way to represent the same in a more correct way. It is all practice, experience and a thorough knowledge of the HTML specifications, which would make a coder compliant to semantics. Here are some insights that I have gained over a period of time as a UX evangelist and Front end engineer, that would help you to be successful in your pursuit of ‘semantic wellness’ :)

Avoid ‘DIV syndrome’

Separating content and presentation using a DIV based layout with CSS, doesn’t mean that DIV is the only tag that you should be using. Avoid ‘DIVITIS’ by carefully choosing the tags for coding your page. This is the first step for ‘ semantic wellness ’.  A great resource to start with is ‘htmlplayground’

It really is a pain, but learn to embrace it

Fast tracking your HTML coding can save you time and you may be able to earn more by billing more to the client. But ‘Better things come at a cost’ ! If you want to be a semantically correct coder, be ready to bear the brunt of the excess hours and frustrating cross-browser issues and fixes. But remember, all those hardships are worth it, and the more you learn to embrace it, the more valuable you would be as a web standard evangelist.

Know the structure of the content/information

For knowing which tags to use where, it is extremely important to understand the type of content, in an Information Architecture level.

For eg .

• The main navigation of a page, are a list of items that have something in common. ie, they all belong to the logical set called, main navigation. Here the ideal HTML tag candidate is unordered list (ul).
• A step wizard, where there are a number of steps required to accomplish a task, will need to have the chronological order of the step as a very important factor. Here the ideal HTML tag candidate is ordered list (ol)
• A list of posts displayed in a page are nothing but unordered lists (ul)
• A glossary with alphabetical segregation is a couplet of, a term and a definition. Here the ideal HTML tag candidate is definition lists (dl)

Some related resources

• Writing semantic markup
• Guide to semantic mark-up

Watch out your Class names and ID names

Semantic wellness does not mainly fall under well written HTML tags. But it spills over to the CSS also. I would easily find out a semantic compliant coder, by scanning through the naming conventions of the classes and IDs of the CSS file !

Always avoid presentational names for classes or IDs, and it would yell out to the world about your attitude towards semantics. Read this for more insights on structural naming convention.

HTML5 – The big leap towards ‘Semantic wellness’

As I told in the introduction of this article, the coming era of the web will be that of Semantic web, and the giants of web have already started embracing this in a very big way. This latest edition to the family HTML is going to be biggest leap of web towards a semantically correct place. With a lot of groundbreaking proprietary tags implemented, and the dependency of various third-party tools being dropped, this version of HTML is truly going to lead the bandwagon towards the semantic web.

Here is a brief account on the new tags that are implemented in HTML5

<header></header>
The header of a 'section', typically a headline or grouping of headlines, but may also contain supplemental information about the section.

<footer></footer>
This tag logically represents the footer section, with the copyright and other footer information including the footer links and all

<nav></nav>
Represents the navigation of the page, where normally there would be a list of links which leads to respetive contents/pages. This tag should be in the same level as header, footer and the main section tags used in a particular page

<article></article>
An article could represent content that logically is equivalent to an entry of a blog, an article or some other content from an external source

<aside></aside>
An aside indicates content that is tangentially related to the content around it.

<audio></audio>
Defines sound, like music or audio streams

<video></video>
Defines video, like video clip or streaming video

The following is a visual representation of the architecture of HTML tags in a typical web page.

Resources on HTML5

• HTML5 Readiness
• Caniuse.com
• HTML5 Security Cheatsheet
• Accessible HTML5 Video
• Test your browser support for HTML5

Resource to help you out in ‘The Pursuit of Semantic Wellness’

Semantics is a vast ocean by itself … and what i have covered here is its relation with the HTML. This article intends to throw on the aspects of semantics, when it comes to coding an HTML page, and is aimed at those aspiring front end engineers and web standards evangelists, to help them out in bringing out the best. Sharing few of the resources that I have gathered over years, which may help you out to become a semantic rockstar :)

• semantic-code-what-why-how
• Div Mania
• Tying web 3.0
• HTML Vs Body Element
• Preparing for HTML5
• W3C Semantic Web FAQ

Don’t forget to share your input with us via comments section. Thanks for reading.