The core technology of the World Wide Web is a mark-up language
called HTML. This language is used for presenting and structuring content on
the internet. Example of a simple “HELLO WORLD!” html:
<html>
<header>
<title>
HTML Trends
</title>
</header>
<body>
Hello
world!
</body>
</html>
The international standards organisation for the World Wide Web is
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The consortium’s aims are to improve the
HTML language in such a way that it is readable by humans and systematically
understood by devices and computers running these devices (web browsers, parsers,
etc.).
HTML5 is the latest revision of the HTML language. This new
version of HTML adds many new syntactic features as well moving the internet
towards a semantic web. Syntactic features include the new <audio>,
<video> and <canvas> elements, as well as MathML for mathematical
formulas and the integration of scalable vector graphics (SVG) content. These
features are designed so that users don’t have to download API’S or plugins to
render audio, video etc, this means one can watch video clips on the internet
without downloading a video player. Other new elements, such as <article>,
<aside>, <section>, <nav> and <header> are designed to improve
the semantic content of documents. These new HTML tags should be used to
emphasise the meaning of the information the page holds rather than just the
page’s presentation. Semantic mark-up was included in the inception of HTML.
Like the example above one can understand that there is a header and body and
the header should describe the content of the body. HTML5 takes this to the
next level in the example below:
<html>
<header>
<title>
HTML Trends
</title>
</header>
<body>
<article>
<title>
HTML5 is Semantic
</title>
<p>
Hello world!
</p>
</article>
<aside>
<p>
This is only an example
</p>
</aside>
</body>
<footer>
Posted
by: Christiaan Storm
</footer>
</html>
In a 2001 discussion of the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee and others gave examples of ways of how we could
get a semantic web. By using semantic elements of HTML intelligent software
‘agents’ like search-engine spiders, may one day automatically crawl the world
wide web and filter, correlate and find preciously published, unrelated facts
for the benefit of the users (Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila 2001). This
discussion was held in 2001 and semantic agents like these are still not a
commonplace today. Some ideas are coming close like WEB 2.0 with its price and
mashups (is a web page that uses content from multiple sources to create a new
single displayed service) comparison websites. The main reason for this is
because current hybridisation (act of mixing different species or varieties)
and aggregation (several things grouped together) of intimation is not included
on the page itself but rather designed in by web developer. If existing HTML5
semantic structures are uniformly and widely applied to published text only
then can we bring out meaning. Only then will search-engine spiders have the
ability to rate the significance of pieces of HTML content (Shadbolt,
Hall, and Berners-Lee, 2006).The only benefit is not only for search-engine spiders of the internet, it also improves accessibility of web documents. Screen readers for example can correctly
interpret the significance of content of a document and not waste the visually
impaired users’ time reading irrelevant information on the document.
Good semantic HTML also improves the accessibility of web
documents. For example, when a screen reader or audio browser can correctly
ascertain the structure of a document, it will not waste the visually impaired
users’ time by reading out repeated or irrelevant information when it has been
marked up correctly (Commons. Mpyreon Introduction to HTML).
References
Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., and Lassila,O. (2001). "The
Semantic Web". Scientific American.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-semantic-web . Retrieved
29 September 2013.
Commons, C. Mpyreon Introduction to HTML. http://zenportfolios.com/davidson/files/2009/11/HTML-by-Choi-Davidson-Salt.docx.
Retrieved 29 September 2013.
Shadbolt, N., Hall, W., and Berners-Lee, T. (2006). The semantic web
revisited. Intelligent Systems, IEEE, 21(3), 96-101.
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