Yo Div

Producing markup is common practice for any who develop initially for the web. Most could probably quite happily say that it is a straight forward process so long as it all looks good on screen. But is it? Fully understanding the reasoning for implementing HTML and using the right tag for its Job (cue the term semantic markup) is highly crucial and beneficial but appears to still be a common misunderstanding around the web. Planning ahead is actually a much harder process than one might expect and requires an initial degree of thought before delving straight in. However, putting effort in in the early stages not only saves on development time and future costs but overtime with practice, just makes plain common sense.

Markup could be understood correctly as a set of tools for formating portions of content. Then styled up accordingly later on using a completely separate tool, namely CSS. (Cascading Style Sheets). A great method of separating page content and style. Just to note: Markup certainly was not set out as a way of styling web documents, a commonly misunderstood myth. Markup is the bed bone of any web page so getting it right first time and giving your content meaning, makes updating/improving vastly easier at a later date.

Making your documents more semantically, deems other benefits like being smaller in file size, therefore reducing bandwidth costs on the server and with style-sheets being cached reduces return trips therefore load times are considerably quicker. They also raise higher importance in search engine results.

This just touches on surface of why its important to produce semantically valid markup, however, provides enough insight as to the reasons why everyone should be making it a number 1 rule when working for the web.