It just takes a little XHTML to be POSH
Feb 12 2008
POSH is not just another acronym emerging from the world of technology. It’s a mindset, a way of thinking and doing things. And to fully demystify it: it is simply a term coined to describe the way standards-aware people are doing markup for the web. The underlying concept is far from being rocket science: POSH being a shorthand for “plain old semantic HTML” basically just refers to the appropriate and validated use of semantic (X)HTML on web pages.
Given the definition mentioned, being POSH involves nothing more than doing things “right” – according to the established web standards. But the microformat community goes even a step further, defining a terminology of so called poshformats.
Poshformats are your personal microformats
Ever since microformats saw daylight in 2005, the movement has gained an amazing momentum. More and more browsers and/or plug-ins identify and utilize data embedded in microformats and most likely also the big search engines have already found their ways of using them to interpret the content of a web page.
However, the number of “official” microformats is limited and there may be a need to express other kind of data semantically. This is where the poshformats come into the picture:
“poshformats may only apply to the person who invented it, or a specific site of theirs, or maybe even just one web page.”
In other words: if there’s no microformat applicable to your use case, you have two options:
- “Be POSH”: Just format the markup the way that appears to be most semantic or
- “Define your own poshformat”: Again, use the best semantic markup you can come up with, but verify it against the principles and process of microformats.
You may want to publish and share any poshformat you might come up with, but keep in mind that poshformats are not automatically microformats. Microformats are community-defined standards (having the aim to make them de facto “industry-standards” that can then be implemented in software used to access/process web content) while poshformats are semantics you define for your own needs and whose semantic value lies in the semantic itself, not in its universal definition.
Applications for poshformats
Poshformats come in handy when you have some data type used repeatedly throughout your site that you would like to be able to get a grip on in some way, either presentational or functional. Three highly descriptive examples of possible use scenarios are:
- using web documents to parse data for a web application (your own or by third parties),
- adding functionality to the presentation of a certain data type through JavaScript (progressive enhancement) and
- using the power and flexibility of CSS for enhanced presentation of certain data entities,
In other words: poshformats help you to unify the way you format your data, enabling semantics-based re-use now, in future or by someone else.
