I find it astonishing to see how many developers create their own sense of modern web technologies based on various snippets of information they gather from all around the web.

Unfortunately information nowadays usually comes from amateur developers with too much spare time to spend on forums and various mailing lists, but not enough time spent trying to implement solid, scalable and useful semantic solutions.

The best place to learn about semantics from is, of course, W3C, which is the closest thing to ‘standards’ we have on the web.

I have had a privilege to work directly for an organisation which is an active member of W3C and have been forced to think about pros and cons of (X)HTML and its implementations and definitions.

This experience has taught me to reference the documentation as often as I need to.

Remember, no-one is expected to know everything off by heart, but at the same time you should not make up solutions based on your gut feelings, unless you are 100% sure about what you are talking about.

W3C is contributed to by very talented engineers and people from world’s leading corporations (i.e. Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc.), who know what they are talking about and have experience working on truly global web-based projects.

Chances are that (however sceptical you might be about each one of these companies) these people know a thing or two about what is happening on the Web and what ought to be happening in the future for the good of us all.

Once you try to propose something a little more meaningful towards a W3C specification you soon become aware of the real strengths and weaknesses of your proposal and work out that it might be useful for you, but not necessarily for the entire world, which is the whole point of Web technologies and the Web itself.

In order not to be preaching any further I find it very useful to refer to the following documents as often as it is necessary:

• (X)HTML 1.0 Strict
• WCAG1.0
• Quality tips for webmasters (useful for pointing content managers and editors to)

Using just those three documents as much as possible will get you very far in the world of semantics and proper UI web developement.

I have been studying them for many years now and some subtle points from those documents still strike me as very interesting and wise even today.