Musing
Semantic HTML, something nice to have but not necessary?
Semantic HTML, which adds meaning to elements, tend to be touted as the best practice that developers should adopt. While the benefits have been listed in many articles, I wonder whether developers use it, and if yes, among the long list of semantic elements, which are the ones being used.
The following article is a summary of what I found based on a sample of top 10 visited websites.
Sample
To keep the sample manageable, I kept the sample size to 10 and shortlisted them based on Alexa.com’s top 10 websites globally.
Operating definition
As I couldn’t find any official definition of semantic HTML, for the purpose of this article, all elements that aren’t <div>s and <span>s are treated as semantic elements since these two are generic tags that are used for block elements and inline elements respectively.
To give a sample of the available HTML elements, below is a list from W3.org…
