Buzzwords and 'buzz-concepts' travel through the web development community like the plague. After using the table element for page layout became faux pax everybody was so quick to jump on the bandwagon that there’s no arguing the point anymore — even in the off-case that it might just be appropriate. It’s such a widespread ’social injustice' that I've even had to explain to people that, "no, it really is okay to use a table here to mark up your tabular data," on more than one occasion.

Obviously, this isn't always a bad thing. It’s great to have people jump on board when something newer, better comes along. Recently, especially with all the hoopla over the new 'HTML5,' there’s been a lot of talk about semantics. Better semantics this, better semantics that. To me, most of the time it feels like we're just "being semantic" because it’s the cool new thing to do. You can go crazy with the label maker machine, but your basement is still going to be a fucking mess.

Garann Means seems to understand this flaw, and provides a great rant why using semantic markup is not always being semantic. Titled Defending Terrible Things, Garann explains the value of the b and i (italic) tags, versus their strong and em ’semantic' alternatives:

You know what strong and emphasis refer to? They refer to verbal inflections. You know what most peoples’ web browsers don’t do? Talk to them. You know what would annoy the shit out of me if I were using a screen reader to read a bibliography on the internet? Listening to a goofy-sounding computer voice try to emphasize every single word of Journal of the Study of Obscure and Mostly-in-Latin Canine Diseases Affecting Generally the Respiratory System but Also Sometimes the Lymph Nodes or something. I don’t know that this is still a problem, but the idea is ridiculous in and of itself. Italic does not always mean emphasis, nor does bold always mean MAKE THIS LOUD. Certain conventions of formatting require the use of bold or italics, but actual writing rarely does. If you need to place emphasis on something, you can do that with word choice. (Or anyway I hear it’s possible..)

Reproduced, because I couldn't have said it better myself.

So, what’s the moral of this story, then? Sometimes the cool, new, 'right way' to do things, isn't always the best way.