The Modern Web

The Importance of Semantic Markup

Before moving on to look at different ways of adding deeper rich meaning to your pages, let’s pause to ask the question, “Why bother with semantics at all?” I mean, is something intrinsically wrong with marking up a page using mostly div elements (as in the following code block)?

<div class="first">This is the heading.</div>
<div class="main"><b>This is the first sentence.</b><br>This is the second sentence.</div>

Divya Manian addressed this in a polemical article, “Our Pointless Pursuit of Semantic Value,” in which she argues that putting too much emphasis on semantic markup is a waste of time for most people:

Mark-up structures content, but your choice of tags matters a lot less than we’ve been taught. …