Fred On Something’s Comments :: June

Semantic markup and why we should care

Warning: I am about to discuss code. Your eyes may experience a slight “glazing over” sensation.

I’ve spent the last year or so devouring countless books, tutorials and articles pertaining to CSS, web standards and blog and CMS technology. In many ways it feels like I’ve had to unlearn everything I’ve been practicing for the last half dozen years or so and start from scratch. This transition was not an urgent necessity—I could have very well continued to build websites the way I always have and they would work just fine. For now.

But I know that the web will look and function very differently than it does today in a few years time, and I intend to be prepared. I am not only looking out for my own career, but for my clients’ investment in the web as well. They may not want to know about web standards now, but soon they will (or at the least, it will surely affect them), and I need to be an expert when that time comes.

One of the main things that the semantic web changes is the search capability. Search will, theoretically, be much more effective than current keyword search. You will be able to enter search string like “I am searching for a used car in Montreal for less than 3000 dollars”. Then the search engines will analyze, semantically, this string and find the best entries.

What to tell to your clients? Simple: if your employees are spending 45 minutes by days to search things, they will now spend only 15 minutes to search what they really want. He will save approximately 75 hours/year/employee or around 2250$ if he have a salary of 30$/hour. Only for each employee… I think it could worth it