Nearly every web designer is guilty of forcing line breaks, creating tables that don't hold tabular data, and a host of other egregious HTML sins. Now that CSS is around, Molly E. Holzschlag slaps our hands and explains why we should pay attention to each element's content, not just its looks.

Surely by now you've heard or seen the term semantics being bandied about by web standards evangelists and document purists. But what does the term really signify in the context of markup, and what do you need to know about semantics to improve your markup practices? This article helps define semantics in HTML and XHTML, and gets you started using elements semantically.