Explaining semantic mark-up

I think it’s important for a web developer to view HTML documents without any external formatting applied. That means without CSS, no JavaScript enhancement, and, if you want, no images as well; instead just the raw content. Look at it, read it through. Does it make any sense? Do you understand which parts are more important than others, which texts are headings, which parts are connected to each other?

If the answer is yes, the document is probably marked up in a nice understandable semantic fashion.

That’s all well and good, and addresses what. But Robert closes with, more importantly, is why:

The benefits of using good semantics in a document are:

• It will be more accessible to people seeing the document in an environment where CSS cannot be applied.
• It will be understandable and coherent to people having it read to them with the help of a screen reader.
• It will help to get a better search engine ranking, since search engines can easier distinguish the importance level of the document’s different parts and what message is being conveyed.
• It will be a lot easier for web developers to maintain the code, and to separate content (HTML) from presentation (CSS).
• In most cases, there will be less code, which isn’t cluttered by formatting, meaning that the web page will be faster to load.