Semantic HTML: the questions we get asked most

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The questions about semantic HTML that come up most often on our calls.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Do we need to care about this?

The right element gives you behaviour and accessibility for free. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How do we know it is working?

Semantic markup is the cheapest accessibility work available. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

In practice

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

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.