Further to arguments against semantics, there are also viable and strong value-adding arguments for semantics. These are:

Semantics give meaning to interfaces

This is by far the most important argument for semantics.

Using semantic mark-up on web pages gives web pages meaning!

Many web developers today still misunderstand the basic definition of semantics and can tend towards thinking that it is somehow about ‘the look of a page with style sheets turned off’, but, in fact, semantics are all about meaning of web pages.

The ‘meaning’ is important for both users (end users and developers of interfaces) as well as machines (which are just another form of users) such as search engine robots and (in future) various semantic interface harnessing tools and languages.

Semantics add value to interfaces

Semantics add value for all types of users.

Chances are not all users of a web site have a big screens, a mouse, a powerful PC, know what they are doing and see very well.

In fact, it is 100% certain that your web site has at least 1 very disabled user, but one that plays (perhaps) the most important role in your web site – Google search robot (also known as indexer).

Semantics aid usability and scalability

Properly developed semantic interfaces are very easy to scale up, re-style and re-organise (all positive and preferable features of any IT system).

Usability of semantic web sites is usually present both from end user perspective as well as from web site developer perspective.

Usability usually saves and earns more money. One example would be the fact that an easy to understand interface is easier for maintenance and upgrading, which saves developer time, which in turn saves money for an organisation.

As an example of usability feature presented by semantic interface would be ability to call a telephone number on a web page directly from Skype, if that telephone number has been marked up as a micro format.

One click and the end user is directly in a telephone conversation with your company’s sales department, generating business for your organisation.

Increases ROI by increasing findability and re-findability

One of the most important aspects of any web sites is that it needs to be findable and re-findable.

Semantic interfaces by their very nature and the fact that they are standards compliant tend to be naturally easier to find, analyse, understand and index for search robots.

The very fact that your interfaces are standards compliant tell search robots that you know what you are doing when it comes to web development and search engines tend to treat this factor very favourably.

In future it may be the case that only standards compliant web sites will be considered ‘valid’ solutions for showing up in search engine result pages.

The very fact that (for example) your e-commerce web site can be easily found will mean that you will obtain more visitors to your site, which ought to convert into more sales for your business.

This way, semantic interfaces become direct mechanisms through which ROI of a business can be increased, without implementing anything other than the standards which have been set out for us in order to make our lives simpler and faster, while increasing quality.

Semantics enable data sharing between applications

W3C standards are not enough in order to provide semantic interfaces.

Semantic interfaces are extensions to W3C standards and can provide much more meaning than just POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML).

With emergence of de-facto standards like micro formats, it has become possible to ‘share’ data from one site with another site without much problems.

RSS feeds are also there to aid similar functionality, but micro formats create ‘interfaces as APIs’, meaning that any machine from anywhere could harvest useful data from your web site (such as your product offers) and make it available in the relevant section of their web site.

Excellent example is Google’s shopping section, which data mines product offers from various web sites on the web and then offers a comparison functionality to enable users of Google search engine to find the best deals across the web and shop from the related web sites.

Semantic interfaces can directly enable this type of functionality and is the reason why web sites like Amazon and Argos are the two most popular e-commerce web sites in UK.

Semantics enable leveraging of social networks

Apart from becoming more meaningful, the web is becoming more ‘personal’ and catered towards group of people with similar interests.

Social networks play a key role in creating these on-line communities and semantic mark-up is, once again, at the heart of enabling development and utilisation of meaningful social networks that work.

Micro formats, RSS and Atom feeds as well as RDF are just some of the examples of technologies which are making this functionality possible.

Less error prone interfaces

For a long time now I have believed in creating web sites without using browser specific hacks.

My latest development of Flexewebs CMS is a good example of how a nice web site can be created using valid (in this case XHTML1.0 Strict) HTML code and simple CSS rules in order to create a scalable and cross browser fast performing interface without any hacks.

Using XHTML1.0 Strict with W3C standards compliant mark up has always made my development life easier and created interfaces which are much easier to control using the usual development tools we have available to ourselves.

More ‘meaningful’ interfaces

Semantic interfaces are also able to communicate a corporate message in a much more meaningful manner than non-semantic interfaces.

Sharing your company’s contact details (for example) using micro formats is a much better approach than doing it in a proprietary, non-standard manner which cannot be easily found by various directories and search engines.

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.