posh

Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH)

Welcome to the POSH home page.

History

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 a proper subset.

Note: the earliest reference to "plain old semantic HTML" that has been found so far is:

• 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." [emphasis added] (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".

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

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POSH Tutorials

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POSH Blogs

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