Hmm, I've been doing web development for over 15 years now, and I was one of the first to jump on the CSS bandwagon ca. 2000. Most of the hand-wringing semantic purity came from front-end people doing small sites or blog templates, and the high watermark was around '03. There was a long period of stagnation and XHTML dying on the vine while the world continued using IE6 interminably.
To me this article is a very good rebuttal to a lot of the arguments that people were throwing around at that time. However these days things are different...
The emergence of WHATWG and the unification of the HTML5 standard and a recommitment by the W3C towards on-the-ground pragmatism have really changed the standards world. HTML5 to me is a breath of fresh air. When I read about the new elements I see that they are directly addressing real world issues, and I see that browsers seem to be picking them up pretty quickly. I don't see a lot of bloat or pointless ceremony like XHTML 2.0, and there is always an eye towards backwards compatibility.
Given these developments, I'd say the effort to understand and utilize HTML5 appropriately is a good investment even if there are no material benefits for a particular tag at this point in time. I don't see it as the huge time sink the author makes out, but rather as something I spend a couple hours a month doing as part of my regular job. It's not about obsessing over things, but just having an ambient awareness of what tags are there and how to use them so that my work is of higher quality and reaps whatever future rewards come down the pipe without extra effort.
To me this article is a very good rebuttal to a lot of the arguments that people were throwing around at that time. However these days things are different...
The emergence of WHATWG and the unification of the HTML5 standard and a recommitment by the W3C towards on-the-ground pragmatism have really changed the standards world. HTML5 to me is a breath of fresh air. When I read about the new elements I see that they are directly addressing real world issues, and I see that browsers seem to be picking them up pretty quickly. I don't see a lot of bloat or pointless ceremony like XHTML 2.0, and there is always an eye towards backwards compatibility.
Given these developments, I'd say the effort to understand and utilize HTML5 appropriately is a good investment even if there are no material benefits for a particular tag at this point in time. I don't see it as the huge time sink the author makes out, but rather as something I spend a couple hours a month doing as part of my regular job. It's not about obsessing over things, but just having an ambient awareness of what tags are there and how to use them so that my work is of higher quality and reaps whatever future rewards come down the pipe without extra effort.