[johnnyworker]

Give me an incentive to use it. If it looks exactly the same and behaves exactly the same, "div" is half the characters of "footer" so it wins.

Personally, the argument that search engines will do nice things with semantic HTML didn't convince me back then, and I don't even see it brought up today, because search, like fish, stinks from the head, and we stopped pretending otherwise.

So that leaves accessibility. Is there a way to visualize what screen readers to with a page? I know about the tools that check for missing ARIA roles and whatnot, but that still doesn't catch me using a div when I should have used aside. And I know I won't try to navigate and use every aspect of things I make by actually using a screenreader. Call me lazy, but that's just not going to happen. But I also don't want to just give up and make it the problem of other people, either. I wanna meet halfway if possible. Any tips or tools or ideas welcome.

[berkes]

Maybe invest in an editor that helps you write ooter></footer> after typing f in the correct place. If amount of characters truly is your reason to avoid semantic markup.

[johnnyworker]

I am not "avoiding" it, I am not going out of my way to implement something that has no effect on anything, other than taking up more characters in files.

If semantic markup is so important to you, give me a reason for why. If the reason is "because I told you so", you just added a reason not to do it.