Jun 3, 2013 2
Meaningful HTML
Today you’ve been asked to create some meaningful HTML. What’s that you ask? We’ll get back to that.
However, you knew that this day would come and prepared for it. You have a very simple, but workable content model jammed packed with meaning and structure. You’ve already done the hard content modelling work and identified the key content types for your business. For for each content type, you have:
- A name.
- A one line description of its purpose.
- A list of its attributes and a one line description for each.
- A clear understanding of the relationships it has with other content types.
- Open and transparent agreement, across business, UX and technology, on all of the above.
So, back to the meaningful HTML task. HTML was never designed to convey meaning. It’s a display language. However, search engines, web crawlers and browsers need meaningful content to better display search results and deliver awesome customer experiences. They can’t do that with a display language. Microdata, RDFa and Microformats are popular Internet specifications that add semantics to HTML to make it meaningful.
You have a content model. Let’s put it to work.
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