How semantic is your site? Find out!

As my other blog posts here discuss, I’ve been walking down the web standards road for a while now, and along the way I often try to think of my implementations from not only the way they behave in visual browsers with support for script and style, but how usable they are in different contexts—other form factors, assistive technologies such as screen readers, global technologies that are there to help such as search engine crawlers, etc.

Along these lines, I came across an interesting utility on the W3C site the other day that will attempt to extract some information from an HTML document via its semantic use of tags.

I don’t know of a front door to the service, but I’ve provided a few links that should illustrate the point:

• Semantic test for msn.com
• Semantic test for MSN Tech and Gadgets
• Semantic test for danboe.net

A well structured page that makes a good use of HTML semantics will show a result that represents an outline of the document. A less semantically structured page will not.

Not bad for a quick sanity pass of how well the site uses headings, and as seen in the danboe.net example, other semantically meaningful constructs, such as definition lists… However, keep in mind that the point is not to build sites that work well against this tool, but rather to encourage you to use semantically rich XHTML that adds more value to your code, allows for a better use of CSS, and makes your markup understandable to a wider range of users, browsers and usages.

Next post (newer)

</floppies>

Previous post (older)

My stylesheets