Plain old semantic HTML

I think there are more than enough of acronyms out there, but one cannot deny the power of monikers when it comes to bringing a technology into mainstream focus.

XMLHttpRequest was invented in 1998 but very few knew about it. Seven years later, Jesse James Garrett came up with the name Ajax and suddenly every marketing department was screaming for it.

Same thing with Silverlight. WPF/E was mentioned on all conferences for over a year, but no one really cared. Suddenly it was renamed Silverlight and everyone wanted to know all about it.

The time has come for another naming game. Enter POSH – Plain Old Semantic HTML. Semantic HTML is definitely nothing new, and it hopefully something that most web developers should know about. It’s kind of silly that it takes names like these for people to start using the new technology, but I suppose it’s better than not knowing about it at all.

What’s next? Who will come up with a short name for web pages that passes W3C validation?