Jason Kottke's revelation that "Standards don't necessarily have anything to do with being semantically correct" has elicited a lot of blog chatter from the usual suspects this week. There's some good information hiding in the numerous recent posts on the subject, but, frankly, we're surprised at the amount of coverage this topic has received. As they often do, Jeffrey Zeldman's comments perfectly put into words exactly what we were thinking:
[Discovering that web standards and semantics are different] is somewhat like discovering that spelling and grammar are not the same thing: good sentence structure does not guarantee correct spelling, and vice-versa.
We think of semantics and standards as independently important, while mutually beneficial. We wrap this site's header in a <h1> tag, for example, not because any validator or Web standard says we have to, but because it's semantically accurate. In this way, the semantic value of our header is independent of any standard. On the other hand, we've found that writing semantically rich documents assists us greatly in using simpler CSS to style our pages, especially when following the simple "context before class" guideline articulated so well by Tantek Celik. Simon Willison:
Semantic HTML elements add a small amount of meaning, but a great amount of structure - a fact that becomes particularly important when you start applying CSS.
We can't imagine why anyone would want to have one without the other.
Further Reading: