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24 ways to impress your friends

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Gingerskhan

Semantic markup is intended for computers to better “understand” our content so that they can do something useful with it. At the most basic level, this would involve a browser or assistive technology presenting the content to us in an appropriate way.

Rebelling against the specifications at the presentation level may have little consequence.

However, as we move further into the semantic web where “intelligent” programs are trying to infer meaning from our content it would be useful if authors adhered to the specifications, but as anyone who has written programs for the semantic web will know, authors often deviate from the specifications.

The semantic application has to perform extra checks on the content to ensure it fits with what is expected. The actual markup used in many cases is ignored.

So if you really want to incite a riot, why even bother with semantic markup?