I’m currently working on improving nefariousdesigns.co.uk - both in design and in technology. I’ve continued to learn lots of great web development “stuff” over the past year, and it’s time I updated my personal site to reflect that burgeoning knowledge. My first port of call is the underlying structure of my HTML - it’s ok, but it could definitely be improved. I recently had a fantastic conversation with Mike Pearce - an old colleague (who’s now a good friend) - regarding document structure in HTML. Whilst peer-reviewing some of his code, I noticed some not-uncommon structural characteristics that, although not wrong, definitely didn’t convey the best semantics within the document. For this reason I thought I’d document some of the stuff I’ve learned about structured HTML and open it up for comment. The Point So what do we gain from enforcing good structure in our HTML documents? Well, to begin with, it aids accessibility by describing and organising our content. This means that screen readers, normal browsers, and even search engines are able to understand our content and can navigate and classify it better. Good structure is often overlooked as being important because we can easily emulate it visually with styling - in fact it’s often the case that a badly structured HTML document is, in fact, inferring structure using paragraphs or table cells styled as headings. This is simply down to developers not understanding the importance of structure within HTML. A well structure HTML document is the base for good web standards, as it allows us to set out an organised template for more semantic content. In fact, it’s the very beginning of semantics.