[troupo]

> But we used to do it, and the outcome was great - semantic, accessible and machine-readable HTML was the norm

You know, there are still people alive who lived through this Golden Age of 10 years ago? 20 years ago? And they call bullshit on your statement.

[ricardobeat]

I started in 2004. Spent the years of 2007-2012 writing semantic, standards-compliant html (microformats, the works), css and js. Even my first years at booking.com still had that as a concern. Unless this was all a fever dream…

[troupo]

You were a statistical anomaly then. Very very very few people wrote or understood what semantic HTML is. And very few do now.

To pretend that there was some time when, unlike now, people wrote semantic HTML en masse is silly.

[ricardobeat]

Maybe we simply had significantly different experiences? We were involved in many conferences and can definitely say it wasn’t just us.

Everyone I knew in the field was doing the same, Zeldman / ALA was everyone’s hero, UX, accessibility and standards compliance were the highlights of every project, not tooling or frameworks. Not saying everything was perfect but the focus was clearly different.