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Topic # 8 :What is Semantic Markup?
html markup is considered semantic when standard html
tags are used to convey meaning
and content structure, not simply to make text look a certain way
in a browser.
Semantic markup is a fancy term for common-sense html
usage: while writing a headline, we should mark it with a heading tag (
<h1>, <h2>). To write basic paragraph text, we need to place the text between
paragraph tags (<p>…</p>). To emphasize an important phrase, we need to mark it with strong
emphasis (<strong>… </strong>).
The
<head> area
is where the web page declares its code standards and document type to the
display device (web browser, mobile phone, iPod Touch) and where the
all-important page title resides. The page head area also can contain links to
external style sheets and Javascript code that may be shared by many pages in the
site.
The
<body> area
encompasses all page content and is important for css
control of visual styles, programming, and semantic content markup. Areas
within the body of the page are usually functionally divided with division (<div>) or
span (<span>) tags.
For example, most web pages have header, footer, content, and navigation areas,
all designated with named <div> tags that can be addressed and visually styled with css.
In order to add our pages to its database, a search engine (such as Google)
will send out so-called crawlers, spiders or bots to harvest the text on our
site. These bots cannot harvest things that are created by Javascript, or 'see'
images (though they do check alt tags). It is important that the website can be
found by people who are looking for its content, therefore we must serve
content to search engine 'bots' in a way that they can interpret, analyse and
identify how relevant it is to the search query.For this to happen, we must
bring to the attention of the 'bots' important information about the page using
various techniques detailed below :
·
Update
Frequency
·
Title
Tag
·
Meta
Description
·
Key
Words
·
Use
Semantic HTML
·
Use
Links in the Content
·
Have a
structured or planned navigation
·
Have a
HTML sitemap
The semantic approach
to web markup is a central concept underlying efficient web coding,
information architecture, universal usability, search engine visibility, and
maximum display flexibility. Web content is accessed using web browsers, mobile
computing devices of all kinds, and screen readers. Web content is also read by
search engines and other computing systems that extract meaning and context
from how the content is marked up in html.
Some designers may want to separate structure from presentation in order to
ward off various woes: unmanageability, unusability, professional shame.
If we use semantically meaningless tags like
<b> or <i>, we need to think of a properly styled emphasis (<em>) or strong emphasis (<strong>) tag to convey more
meaning.
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