In our day-to-day work on creating good quality web interfaces, we inevitably come across various arguments against using semantic and proper markup in order to develop interfaces. Some of these arguments may be one or more of the following:
Semantic interfaces will not make more money for the organisation
There are many companies out there that do not know what semantics are all about. After all semantics are only now being taught at Universities.
From that lack of understanding stems the lack of belief that semantic interfaces will add more value to business and therefore make more money for the organisation.
It could be almost impossible bringing a client up-to-date with what is currently going on with Internet and where it is all heading towards.
Usually one of the best ways to show someone value of semantics is to demonstrate a working example of where they have made a difference, but often this does not work as clients can be sceptical about whether the same or similar approach would work for their business.
Semantics may only benefit Google and Yahoo
Some companies who are a little more insightful about web technologies, various activities taking place between various ‘big players’ (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) may say that adding semantics to web pages is all about helping various data mining technologies do a quicker and better job of ’stealing’ data from various web sites and storing them in a very structured way into their own databases.
Later on, these big players will (one way or another) be making money through re-representing that data to their users in a way which, in the long term, may take users away from the initial web site where the data originated from.
This argument could potentially prove to be a very good one, but let’s wait and see what happens in the future.
An example here would be the situation of what happened with Google News, where many publishers were annoyed by the fact that their content was being harvested by Google to show a list of latest news headlines.
Publishers of news were annoyed about the fact that Google was comapring their content with competing newspapers’ content, as well as potentially stealing their advertising revenue, based on material which the newspapers wrote themselves in the first place.
Semantics are a (very) (fast) moving target
One day a micro format may look one way – another day it may change. Some clients may perceive things to be moving forward very fast, but in reality we all know this is not really the case.
If anything, things are moving too slowly forward (look at what happened with HTML5 vs. XHTML2.0 situation).
Clients may feel that constant changes which affect web user interfaces mean that ‘waiting for later’ in order to implement new features is a good idea. In reality this often proves to be a matter which loses the given company a competitive advantage.
Semantics are not really a standard
Semantics are at best a ‘tribally’ accepted set of ‘common practices’ and semantic developers disagree heavily amongst each other about what really constitutes proper semantic interfaces.
There is no be-all and end-all document which outlines all the possible situations which web developers could find themselves in from project to project. What should standard implementations then be?!
Yahoo may come up with some common patterns to use when developing for web, but may of these patterns in practice show to be an overkill or not fitting the purposes for whatever reason. Yahoo’s patterns are often suitable for ‘mega-sites’ like Yahoo itself, but not necessarily for smaller and medium sites.
Many companies simply do not care about semantics on their web sites
For most companies the age old approach of ‘just get it done’ still rules the business.
Nike made billions out of it by rephrasing that into ‘Just do it’, but in IT domain this approach is incredibly dangerous and creates solutions which are virtually impossible to maintain even in the short term and take many times longer to develop in the first place, with many more people than really needed.
This is arguably one of the biggest problems web developers may come across today when trying to implement proper solutions.
Bottom line is that clients care about money and time and web developers (wrongly) jump to conclusions that implementing semantic and standards compliant solutions will take more money and more time for the client. In fact, in practice it ought to take less time and money! All it requires is a an appropriate enough approach.
Written by Jason Grant, BSc, MSc on 27th May 2008