A practical checklist for semantic HTML

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Run through this the next time semantic HTML comes up.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

The checklist

• The right element gives you behaviour and accessibility for free
• A div with a click handler is not a button
• Semantic markup is the cheapest accessibility work available
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

Why this earns attention

The right element gives you behaviour and accessibility for free. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

How to tell if yours is fine

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. Three things worth confirming about semantic HTML before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Semantic markup is the cheapest accessibility work available — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.