In the UK Posh is a phrase meaning upmarket, rich or upper class. Its origins are based in the cruise liner industry. The most sought after cabins that were frequented by the richer passengers on journeys to India were on the port side for the outward-bound journey and on the starboard side on the home-bound journey, because they were more shielded from the sun.

‘Port Out, Starboard Home’ then became abbreviated to Posh and attributed to the rich passengers.

But now it has a new meaning. Some big names in development world came up with the acronym POSH, meaning ‘Plain Old Semantic Markup’, with a goal to promote semantic markup.

What?

POSH is an umbrella term for using semantic markup and best practices when creating markup for your web pages. Its all about using the correct semantic markup to create structured content in pages, separating out this structure from presentation and other good practices to make your markup play nice.

Why are you not POSH?

To be honest it is not hard to POSH, there is not real excuse for not producing POSH markup.
So why are there so many web pages out there that are still not built with proper semantic markup. I would say its down to a number of things.

1. Ignorance - not being aware of these techniques and best practices. Hopefully snappy acronyms like POSH will bring about more awareness.
2. Laziness - “It takes too long to learn CSS. I’ll do this page in tables because its easier for me.”, come on son! call your self a professional, get with the times and learn CSS.
3. Old code base - Legacy code that spits out table based layouts need updating and that takes time and money, both of which you may not have.
4. You use ASP.NET, although things are improving slowly!

There are many benefits to using POSH and not so many drawbacks.

Benefits of POSH

• Pages are easier to read and understand, therefore they will be easier and quicker for developers to maintain and debug.
• Pages are more portable to other devices other that web browsers.
• Pages are structured correctly making them more search engine friendly.
• Pages are more accessible, easer to read by screen readers.

Drawbacks of POSH

• Effort, you have to get off your arse and learn something new.
• Having to update your legacy CMS which will take time and money.

I know that this post may seem a bit biased but I can genuinely not think of a good reason not to use POSH in your code.

If your CMS still produces tables and all manner of tag soup then bear this in mind. It makes bad business sense not to update your CMS to use POSH, you are limiting your potential market. A CMS that produces more search engine friendly and accessible markup will be more attractive to clients and may well give you the edge you need against other competing CMS’s.

How can I be POSH?

A good starting point is to check out the POSH page on the microformats wiki. There is a good checklist and resources to give your markup the POSH touch.

If I am preaching to the converted then help spread the word!