Assignment 2: Semantic Markup

I will be completely honest here. Semantic Markup confuses me. Initially, I went to Yahoo Answers which led me to Wikipedia.com which only led to further confusion. One blog I read took a simple three-letter tag and made it semantic by adding 60 more characters to the tag. It’s like watching “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon” when they say a whole sentence, but the subtitles only read, “Hello.” You know something is lost in translation. Also, the thought of having to relearn what I know of HTML to something longer and more complicated is a terrifying and depressing thought.

One of the blogs that I found was Rick Murphy’s The Phaneron. The blog was entitled, State of the Semantic Web: Representation and Realism. It’s cool, he lost me too. This is the part of the semantic web that I am not excited about at all.

Then I came across a blog that simplified it all for me. In Robert’s Talk, the author shows how semantic markup makes the coding easier to read, and it leaves out all styling in the HTML. This is how I was taught, so it is nice to know that I am, at least, heading in the right direction. I also found one more by Hollis Bartlett. He helps explain some of the monetary values of a semantic design.

For me the biggest thing that I am interested in while designing a site is that it is accessible to a large audience. I would go into a different media if I wanted to limit that. Also, I get a little excited when I think of the different ways people are now able to access the net and the different ways they will be able to access it in the future. I think that it is good for us to start designing for that now.