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A List Apart’s article “A Preview of HTML 5” gives an overview of the current status of HTML5. One of the cool things about HTML5 is that it would introduce new elements that would provide semantic alternatives to using the div element for page layout.

HTML 5 introduces a whole set of new elements that make it much easier to structure pages. Most HTML 4 pages include a variety of common structures, such as headers, footers and columns and today, it is fairly common to mark them up using div elements, giving each a descriptive id or class.

The use of div elements is largely because current versions of HTML 4 lack the necessary semantics for describing these parts more specifically. HTML 5 addresses this issue by introducing new elements for representing each of these different sections.

Some good tips for making your markup more POSH can be found over at 456 Berea St. in their article “POSH Plain Old Semantic HTML”

Explaining the benifits web standards to clients or management is always difficult. The advantage of using them is difficult to quantify in terms of dollars. It is even more difficult to justify spending even a small amount of development time to semantic markup.Robert Nyman has put together a great article “Explaining semantic mark-up” that will help explain the benefits of using semantic markup. Here is a quick list of the key points in his article.

• more accessible with out CSS
• screen reader friendly
• better search engine rankings
• easier to maintain the code
• faster load times because of smaller HTML file sizes

Helping your client maintain markup quality is a difficult problem solve when your client is using a CMS to input their own content. The article “Helping your client maintain markup quality” over at 456 Berea St. looks at an interesting way to inform the CMS user when they creating non compliant markup with the WYSIWYG editor.

Confusion is one thing that a web developer must avoid creating. When you create confusion in users it leads to them leaving your site, most likely never to return. Having invalid markup causes confusion in web browsers and search engines. What this means is that your site is more than likely going too marred by improper renderings, the browser crashing on the user, or pages that remain forever un-indexed by search engines. All of these issues can lead to frustrating and confusing the visitors of you site.

There are several great tools that you can use to validate your markup.

• HTML Validator at the W3C
• Tidy
• Web Developer Firefox Add On

Plain Old Semantic HTML is all about using semantic HTML to markup web pages. POSH is definitely a term that captures the essence of this concept. Check out Microformats POSH page to learn more.