
The practical value of semantic HTML - feross
https://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2018/the-practical-value-of-semantic-html/
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CM30
Yep, there's pretty much no reason not to use semantic HTML at this point. The
only thing that could have possibly ever stopped you using it in the past was
IE's awkward browser support for nav/aside/article/whatever in IE8 or so, but
come on. It's 2019 now, and chances are, your web app probably wouldn't work
in such an outdated browser anyway.

There's no excuse for div soup any more.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Semantic HTML is more than a few easy steps to clearer document structure. For
example, to ensure that screenreaders process your page correctly, you have to
wrap every single foreign-language name or phrase sprinkled in English text in
<span lang=""> tags. It is evident that the majority of web designers and
content writers can't be bothered to do that.

~~~
lucideer
> _can 't be bothered_

This is it. Not only were web developers much more "bothered" with putting
actual effort into trying to produce a considered product in the past, they
did so _without the tooling we take for granted today_.

Half the projects I've worked on recently use contexualised i18n wrappers to
process and output strings, or an equivalent custom generic React component,
or similar. How simple would it be to add `lang=""` support to such a
workflow, compared to what would have been involved in doing this 10 years ago
(I'm aware this might seem exaggeration as 10+ years ago we still had similar
stuff with gettext, et al—still used today by even Wordpress—but I'm more
talking about recent changes to tooling-oriented frontend web development,
which should in theory have made this type of stuff a lot easier).

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blowski
I've been building websites since the mid-90s, and I'm not convinced the past
was any better than the present.

~~~
lucideer
As an attempt to sway you, consider that I'm in no way suggesting that the
past was _good_ , rather just that the present is _worse_.

Also, a caveat is that I'm not saying it was a better/nicer/more fulfilling
experience _doing_ frontend development in the past (e.g. IE <7), but rather
that developers put in more effort, were more considerate, and generally
achieved what little they managed to achieve within (what would today be
considered) severely restricted environments, with far fewer resources / tools
at their disposal.

Whether the output of that work was a better product is debatable, but I don't
think it's untrue that devs did more with less (and when I say "more", I don't
mean mean bloat).

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z3t4
A lot have happened to HTML since I started with web development in the 90's,
but I'm still waiting for the semantic web to catch on ... One problem is the
rule of least resistance, people will usually do as little markup as possible.
Adding schema itemprop etc is a lot of work for very little gain. The only
effect is that it's now easier for Google to scrape your web page to show the
data in the search result, instead of sending the user to your site. You offer
free lunch, and your biggest competitor takes it all, then sell it for profit.
For this reason, sites like Facebook and Linkedin make a lot of effort to make
it hard or impossible to scrape data. There are also a lot of other sites that
keep hugging their data, walling it off from the rest of the word. This is why
the sematic web have a very hard time, even though it's such an great idea.

~~~
CM30
Quite a few SEOs would say it's better to have your page shown in the infobox,
even if people can get the answer there, since it pushes your competitors down
the page and out of view for that query. If you're both first and have that
giant sidebar/top block in your favour, you're a lot more likely to get
clicked than if not.

[https://moz.com/blog/how-to-appear-in-googles-answer-
boxes-w...](https://moz.com/blog/how-to-appear-in-googles-answer-boxes-
whiteboard-friday)

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have_faith
If anyone in your company needs convincing just tell them it's good for SEO.
Seems to be the magic bullet for getting accessibility efforts through.

