Semantic HTML

It seems that Mr. Eric Meyer has not updated his Welcome to the edge web page. I remember buy his book, and reading it everyday, and every night. It was so refreshing, and informative. But anyway, that page has not been modified for years. But hey, why mess with near-perfection. It’s even gotten a PR7, and 180,000 Yahoo links. Man…Maybe I should publish a book someday, and put up a page about it?

Popularity: 36% [?]

It seems that recent SEO (Search Engine Optimization) movement has been geared to the tune of the Google Trumpet. You see, the big G (Google) has stated that it will not tolerate paid linking for the sole benefit of SEO. What they are saying is that their PR (PageRank) should not be up for sale.

And I believe that many sites out there are buying links for the sole purpose of gaining some Link Love off of high PR sites. But it has been taken to the extreme in my book. Now some in the industry are saying that you are Black Hat if you sell links. What a load of trash. They are linking (no pun intended) honest webmasters who want to monetize their hard ‘Net labors by selling off precious web real estate to like minded, relevant and thematic “sister sites” with the likes of Spam Masters who deal in Black Hat techniques.

That Is So Wrong!

Why can’t you, as an honest person who is becoming an authority in your niche, write blog posts that will contain paid links to other sites that would benefit your readers anyway? I truly believe that those touting this agenda are sitting back, counting their dollars from lucrative affiliate links and Google AdWords (Google’s “paid link” marketing product).

So I say, yes - monetize your websites. Just make those paid links relevant and useful towards your niche audience.

Popularity: 86% [?]

What are Template Driven Semantics? A new catch phrase? No, we have too many catchy phrases already. What I mean by Template Driven Semantics is the art of creating website templates, whether they be for WordPress themes, or for a stand alone website, that are fully Plain Old Semantic HTML driven and based. The perfect example for what I’m talking about is what’s happening with WordPress themes.

You see, there’s such a need today for POSH templates in today’s market, as otherwise, web site design will maintain it’s spaghetti code, invalid, table based markup. But - and here’s my point - if we web standard designers will flood the industry with our semantically correct, W3C valid and accessible template designs, we could in reality change the landscape of our industry for the good.

There is discussion right now in an email list I belong to, the  WP-Hackers newsgroup, about closing the security gap in the (mostly semantic) WordPress theme downloads. So, not only is WordPress a platform you can count on for minimizing your administration of a website/blog - but you can also trust them too.

Popularity: 100% [?]