The real dream has been that one day, HTML and XML would be combined (not just in terms of the XHTML standard), and that the web would turn into a big soup of meta information.  This would allow all sorts of wonderfully customizable content, searching, cross-threading, and possibly, someday, even help create some kind of internet based solely on context, rather than infrastructure and IP.  Positives: super-personalized web-browsing, advertisements, and content aggregation.  Negatives: super-personalized web-browsing, advertisements, and content aggregation.

But I digress.  The flock to div tags as cleaner and more semantically meaningful has been a beneficial one, but for we web developers who remember the [good?] [bad?] old days, there are more than a few cases in memory of the development community rushing en masse to the next greatest thing, and then flipping it into reverse with the release of the next IE browser / web standard / greatest thing.

It has gotten to the point where I have seen postings looking for people who write div- and css-based code – no tables allowed!

This is madness.  What is XML, after all, than a method of organizing data?  When you’re getting an XML feed from a backend, you are converting your data from a table-based format (database) to a markup-based format.  Same data (we hope).  The real question here is page layout.  Surely web developers who are using and editing one another’s code would rather see:

<div id=”header”><!– header –></div>

than

<table border=”0″ class=”table” cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″>
<tr>
<th><!– header –></th>
<tr>
etc.

But while that div is nice and neat and it allows for better accessibility, it does not do as well when it comes time for, let’s say:

this.

Also, despite the wonderful blessing that is CSS (it can be quite soothing), when something goes wrong with the style sheet, the result can be disastrous.  Of course, we all want to write code that degrades gracefully, but the fact is that, the more we ask of our code – especially as we utilize style sheets – the more risk we run that if something breaks on the backend (certainly our code would never break), or a user is tied to a hopelessly outdated browser, the result will be unintelligible.

But back to semantics, for their own sake.  Perhaps it comes down to a particular aesthetic, but the notion of a fully semantic web makes me think of those kitschy items that have the word for the item printed on them, for example a mug that says “MUG”.  Maybe there is a bit too much big-picture here, for a change.  Net neutrality’s goal is access and publishing rights for anyone with an internet connection.   It’s not hard to imagine a semantic web that wants to take choices out of our hands and push certain content in front of our eyeballs for us.

As for us developers, if the goal is good, solid code, the answer seems to be, like with much else, a healthy mix of new and old, with an eye towards every tool and its best use.