Is your Website POSH?

Posted on | August 28, 2009 | 3 Comments



Deepblue Head Programmer Matthew Prothero here to ask you: Is your Website POSH?

But first: what is POSH?

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. Read more about this on the microformats.org Wiki.

So, Plain Old Semantic HTML. But what does that actually mean?

Simply put, it means using standards based HTML (or XHTML) coding to generate your site, avoiding such malarkey as tables-based layout and deprecated tags.

There are many great tutorial sites available which explain things far better than I could, so I’ll just give the basics:

  • First, be sure you are not using Tables to lay out your web page (spacer .gifs are right out!). This is an old trick from the dawn of websites that has been superceded by CSS layouts – but you’d be surprised how many so-called web designers are still using them!
  • Second, be sure to validate your code! The W3C has an online validation tool which will pinpoint any errors in your html – rectify those errors and re-submit until it validates!
  • Finally, separate your content, styles and behaviours. Old websites tended to have a mish mash of font tags, inline javascript and so on, which could really slow down a browser! Nowadays, you should split your pages into multiple files: CSS to handle the style and layout of the page, Javascript files to handle your scripting, and of course your html file itself to contain the content.

I’m not saying you have to do all of these things, but every little helps. But what are the benefits of a POSH site?

  • Higher Accessibility – a POSH site will be easier to use for people browsing by alternate means – for example, a text only browser or screen reader.
  • Better Search Engine Rankings – it won’t necessarily shoot you to #1, but clean markup and smaller file sizes help search robots to index your page.
  • Smaller file sizes – by splitting your pages into several files and removing layout tables, your html files will be a lot smaller. Not only will you free up space on your web server, but you can reduce your bandwidth costs too (External CSS and Javascript files get cached – i.e. only downloaded once when someone visits your site).

All in all, being POSH is good for your site! That’s why here at deepblue we make all our new sites as POSH as possible!

Classic article first posted on 1st May 2007

Category: Web design best practices

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