Tag: semantics

Categories
A List Apart Accessibility Design Markup

ALA 288: Access & semantics

In Issue No. 288 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: Margit Link-Rodrigue advises us to integrate accessibility with front-end development instead of treating it as an afterthought—an item on a checklist. And Joe Clark analyzes why some forms of writing resist being expressed as semantic HTML.

A List Apart, for people who make websites.

Unwebbable
by JOE CLARK
It’s time we came to grips with the fact that not every “document” can be a semantic “web page.” Some forms of writing just cannot be expressed in HTML—or they need to be bent and distorted to do so. But for once, XML can help. Joe Clark explains.
The Inclusion Principle
by MARGIT LINK-RODRIGUE
To make accessible design an organic element of front-end development, we must free our thinking from the constraints we associate with accessible design and embrace the inclusion principle. Margit Link-Rodrigue tells us how.

[tags]alistapart, semantics, accessibility, design, webdesign, markup, XML, link-rodrigue, joeclark[/tags]

Categories
Code Community Standards Web Standards

Micro-semantics for fun and profit

At corebasis.com, Henning von Vogelsang modestly presents his initiative to use an asterisk as a semantic reference for “source:”

Recent history taught us, if something is simple, makes sense and it is easy to use, it will most likely become a standard. … Through the increasing expansion of Twitter, the at-sign (@) has become a standard reference for a sender’s name. … Another change (introduced 2007) was the usage of hashtags (#). …

To help distinguish the source of information from a person, I propose we start using the following pattern:

  • @name
  • #tag
  • *source

[tags]semantics, micro, asterisk, proposal[/tags]

Categories
Accessibility Community Design development eric meyer events Ideas industry maturity Memes Standards technorati Tools

Happy fourth birthday, real world semantics

Four years ago today, Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks gave a presentation on real-world semantics. Working backwards from HTML extensions like XFN (created by Tantek, Matt Mullenweg, and Eric Meyer), the paper showed how designers and developers could add semantics to today’s web rather than starting from scratch or waiting for a “purer” markup language to bring us an “uppercase semantic web.”

As with ‘most all great ideas, the principles were simple and, in hindsight, profoundly obvious. Do what designers were already doing. Instead of toiling over new languages that might or might not get adopted, use existing (X)HTML elements such as rel and class, and agree on such things as common class names for simple things like relationship definitions.

On behalf of all web designers and developers, thank you, Tantek and friends, and happy birthday.

[tags]microformats, semantics, realworld, tantek, xfn, hcard, 4years[/tags]