posh

Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH)

Welcome to the POSH home page.

Origins

The acronym POSH was coined on 6 April 2007 on the microformats IRC channel, by <kwijibo> as a shorthand abbreviation for plain-old-semantic-html. A discussion on among John Allsopp, Tantek Çelik, Jeremy Keith, and Chris Messina at the Microformats Dinner 2007 April 18 following Web 2.0 Expo reraised the idea of POSH and the importance of promoting the broader goal of POSH, of which microformats are built from and a proper subset. For more see History.

Why

The term semantic-html is a mouthful, and belies both how simple it is, how well established it is among modern web designers, and the fact that it has benefits far beyond the obvious doing the right thing for the Web by using semantic markup. We need a simple short mnemonic term that captures the essence of the concept, and is easily verbed (to posh, poshify, poshed up).

Be POSH

What can you do to be POSH and to make your websites POSH?

1. Publish POSH content. Make sure your website publishes valid semantic (X)HTML, and uses semantic-class-names.
2. Spread POSH. Encourage others to be POSH and POSHify their websites by linking to this page.
3. Improve POSH. Help us gather resources to enable more people to easily POSHify their websites.

Resources

POSH Presentations

• ...

POSH Tutorials

• ...

POSH Magazines

• A List Apart: For People Making Websites

POSH Blogs

Blogs that with some regularity post high quality discussions, insights, and in general have advanced the state of the art of POSH.

• David Baron's weblog
• Jeffrey Zeldman Presents
• meyerweb.com - Eric Meyer
• SimpleBits - Dan Cederholm (see in particular SimpleQuiz)
• ...

POSH Blog posts

• Writing Semantic HTML by Jesse Skinner (2006-02-22)
• The Importance of Being POSH by Tantek Çelik
• ...

See more blogs talking about "semantic HTML" and POSH.

History

plain old semantic HTML

The earliest references to "plain old semantic HTML" that have been found so far are:

• 1998-05-01: Kirrily 'Skud' Robert on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design - "The site is implemented in HTML 4.0 Transitional with style sheets; this means that anyone with an older browser won't get presentational markup, just plain old semantic HTML. "
• 2006-09-21 Drew's comment by on "Tables and SEO": "I’d say it’s well worth it for a variety of reasons to only use tables when you’re presenting tabular data, and use plain old semantic HTML to mark up your content in all other cases." (retrieved by Tantek 08:20, 20 Apr 2007 (PDT))

If you can find earlier references, please add them and include a brief quotation of the context of the reference to "plain old semantic HTML".