Is your website POSH?

Last week my attention was drawn to yet another TLA (actually FourLA). This one (POSH) is just as useless as AJAX however, just like AJAX the stupid acronym does serve a purpose.

Who told her she's POSH

POSH or Port Out, Starboard Home is how web developers travel to the east in order to stay cool and out the sun on their swankety yaughts.

It also happens to stand for Plain Old Semantic HTML and it's got to do with those microformat people. The microformats wiki has an new addition in the POSH page. According to the wiki it was coined on the microformats IRC channel, by the user kwijibo.

The general idea is that we use it to describe and to encourage designers/developers to use proper valid markup and get away from those table layouts (Bed and BReakfast sites). This should be bread and butter to most but for those not already there yet promotes healthy learning and a stepping stone into microformats.

This is very much the thrust of the wiki and is very much backed by the genius that is Tantek on his blog. However. It (the wiki) may be missing a trick though which I think Jeremey Keith might have bashed on the head.

POSH patterns

We all have our own personal markup patterns that we use all the time to markup our data. However just because they have some nice class names and we allways do it that way doesn't make it a microformat. However so long as it is valid and semantic then it is POSH.

The term POSH pattern exites me (mildly) into thinking that we as a community should share these patterns and develop them together and then maybe they might become fully fledged microformats (via the wiki) or possably just really nice ways to mark stuff up.

No matter what they become it's an opportunity to learn and I hope thats what Jeremy was hoping and getting at (If you happen to be Jeremy Keith please send me an email. heavyweightgeek at gmail.com)

Apparently this came about after a visit to Edinburgh, which comes as no surprise!

Conclusion

So is this just another pointless acronym? Well yes and no. AJAX is pointless in that we mostly been doing it for ages we just didn't call it AJAX. The name though brought meaning to it (XHR objects and things) and made people think in a new way. It made the tubes cool again.

I don't think for a second POSH or POSH patterns will have quite the same effect but it is a good vehicle to get people thinking about coding like the web professionals we are and you should do your best to publisise it.