Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH)
Web design must be pretty high up the leader board in terms of the industry with the most acronyms and abbreviations.
So it’s great to know we have a new one; POSH or Plain Old Semantic HTML has been coined with the intention to make semantic HTML cool and interesting again. The gripe is that the web design community is getting really excited about AJAX and Microformats but Plain Old Semantic HTML hasn’t been invited to the party.
So what is Plain Old Semantic HTML and why should we care? Semantic HTML is mark-up with meaning. So for example rather than using a paragraph tag and line breaks for a list it would be better to mark them up within an unordered list or ordered list tag and then nest each item in the list within list item tags. So the HTML code itself is describing the content as a list.
What the POSH acronym is trying to promote is for the web design community to blog about the way we mark-up content and share our code and ideas with others. For example on the recent .Net podcast when talking about POSH, Jeremy Keith gave the example of what is the best way to mark up a conversation in HTML? He suggested that it was simply an ordered list of blockquotes.
Encouraging the web design community to put more thought into the way we mark-up content and also standardise our approach is only a good thing so POSH is a worthy addition to the web design acronym list.
