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Meaningful markup provides the developer with several important benefits. Meaningful pages are much easier to work with than presentational ones. For example, say you need to change a quotation on a page. If the quotation is marked up correctly, it is easy to scan through the code until you find the first blockquote element. However, if the quotation is just another paragraph element, it will be a lot harder to find. For a more complicated, but no less realistic example, say that you needed to add an extra column to your homepage. You could simply drop the content in at the right point and then update the widths in your CSS. To do the same in a table-based layout you’d need to add an extra column in your table, change the colspan settings, alter the widths on all the cells, and change the widths of all your shim gifs. In effect, you’d have to change the entire structure of your page to accommodate this simple change.

As well as being easy for humans to understand, meaningful markup—otherwise known as semantic markup—can be understood by programs and other devices. Search engines, for instance, can recognize a headline because it is wrapped in h1 tags and assign more importance to it. Screen reader users can rely on headings as supplemental page navigation.

Most importantly for the context of this book, meaningful markup provides you with a simple way of targeting the elements you wish to style. It adds structure to a document and creates an underlying framework to build upon. You can style elements directly without needing to add other identifiers, and thus avoid unnecessary code bloat.

HTML includes a rich variety of meaningful elements, such as

As such, it is always a good idea to use an appropriate meaningful element where one exists.

Every few years the CSS versus tables argument seems to flare up on blogs, mailing lists, or developer forums. The discussion is usually sparked when developers who have grown accustomed to the table-based approach rebel against the idea of having to learn a new skill. I can sympathies with this reaction, as CSS-based layout does seem difficult at first, especially when your current process seems to work. However, the benefits of CSS have been debated numerous times and include things like less code bloat, faster downloads, and easier maintenance to name just three. Most professional developers have come to see the benefits of web standards, and it’s rare to see an agency of any size or quality doing things the old-fashioned way. So if you’re still using table based layout, you’re going to find it increasingly difficult to get work with agencies. Thankfully, these old habits are dying out, and there is a whole new generation of developers who have never had to suffer the inconvenience of table-based layout.