molly.com

Wednesday 2 May 2007

Getting POSH

For those who haven’t heard about plain old semantic HTML, well, lookout. Even if it takes YADA (yet another damned acronym), leading thinkers within the microformats community have decided we should all get POSH.

The idea behind POSH is to use an acronym a la AJAX to quickly disseminate the idea of semantic markup. POSH principles are just plain good practice, but when I first heard the acronym I balked and felt it wasn’t semantic. Today, Tantek decided to cure me of that apparent misperception and has made me a POSH convert, as this photo shows:

photo

The fab Cyra Richardson, whom I work with at Microsoft and who was part of this silliness, pointed us to some Spice Girls lyrics. I’ve taken her most posh modifications to the song one step further and would like to offer a snippet here to the community as the POSH theme song:

POSH Up Your Site!

When you’re feeling sad and low
We will take you where you gotta go
Smiling, dancing, everything is free
All you need is positivity

Colours of the world
POSH up your site
Every boy and every girl
POSH up your site
People of the world
POSH up your site
Aaahh!!!

Float it to the left
If you’re having a good time
Float it to the right
If you know that you feel fine
z-index to the front
Uh Uh go round
position it to the left
If you’re having a good time
position it to the right
If you know that you feel fine
Webdevs to the front
Hi Ci Ya Hold Tight

The original lyrics are here. Please feel free to modify the song to your own POSH style.

Filed under:   general
Posted by:   Molly | 22:04 | Comments (41)

Comments (41)

  1. POSH, i like it. Though mixing it with Spicegirls is like putting icky goo besides shiny stars. I’ll spread the word, though, yes its like AJAX, its something i have been doing all my life. My work is POSH! 😀

  2. We’ve been having slight fun with this at TSTC (Waco, Tx Technical school). One of the teachers sent an email to another about POSH, I put it on my LJ and the next day I asked him if he had POSH’d today. One of the other students asked about it, got extra points on his grade for actually finding it.

    And Yes, I POSH each day. And yes, I loose respect for people who don’t (gods, could think of one site that NEEDS it).

  3. ouch, ouch, ouch my brain hurts…. i can imagine the band member identities: markup spice, style spice, behaviour spice, application spice and database spice… 🙂

  4. Don’t forget Validation Spice to make sure everyone knows their cues.

  5. But we’ve already got a posh spice… just need the others to fall in line now

  6. I’m not sure that I’m that wild about ‘POSH’. The purpose of the ‘brand’ hasn’t really been well spelled out for me. Semantic markup, obviously, has value – it’s more accessible for screen readers, it’s a lot easier to style semantic rather than presentational markup with CSS, it’s easier to use DOM methods with, Google crunches through it with greater ease and thus gives you higher rankings, but it doesn’t seem to solve the specificity problem.

    I’m hoping that what POSH will do – if anything – for the Semantic Web (better yet, the web of data – the word semantic confuses far too many people) is get people to put out blog entries and wikis about their design patterns and bring about bubble-up semantics. This is one of the ideas that is in GetSemantic – we take a simple idea like ‘I want to put up all the movies I’ve watched’, and then produce a semantic XHTML pattern, as well as XSL to scrape it and map it to RDF ‘micro-models’.

    Note for non-SemWeb geeks: don’t take anything I have just said as a reason not to POSH up your sites. I’d rather be scraping semantic XHTML than, well, MySpace – and I’d rather your site was accessible and standards-based than nested tables (I actually saw a ‘mobile’ site the other day written in tag soup with four levels of nested tables). Web designers need to consider, though, that there are going to be more things reading your content than just browsers with eyeballs attached – there are machines with databases attached too, and the innovation is going to come from the scrapers that aren’t Google-sized. You can help them out by producing valid, semantic (X)HTML.

  7. Oh what a lovely photo of you Molly to brighten up my morning!

  8. That song is almost as cheesy as the original.

  9. POSH rocks ! Glitter Molly !

  10. Okay… so who’s going to be first to say which spice girl Molly is?

    – Neil.
    (who values parts of his anatomy way too much to risk it 🙂 )

  11. Posh? Spice Girls??

    Christ. Geeks shouldn’t be allowed to congregate in any one place for longer than fifteen minutes.

  12. I just heard about this recently myself. It’s good to be POSH.

  13. This rebranding is getting ridiculous, and seriously harms the credibility of the webstandards movement.

    I’ll be in my cave.

  14. @Hayo:

    I disagree. Having a catchy name helps the marketing/business/non-tech crowd latch on to things. Look at terms like AJAX and mashups. They may make me cringe as a developer, but I know that I’ll have a much easier time getting clients on board if there’s a clever buzzword associated with semantic markup.

    If we have to make up goofy acronyms to get buy-in from the non-technical, then so be it!

  15. Silly acronyms seems to be the best way to get things into the mainstream.

    Now if we can work POSH practices into the HTML 5 recommendation we’ll be set.

  16. I rather explain stuff to people then tell them ZOMG!!!!11! UU have 2 use COOOOLLL ACornymmzZZ!

    I never had any problems explaining marketing people why something was needed; but mostly they never needed to know in the first place. Semantic HTML is a Good Business Practice (GBP?) and not an awesomeness new techie thingy. Tech should stay out of the hands of marketing, as the whole web2.0 bollocks tought us.

    I guess I’m just allergic to kool-aid (too artificial for my tastebuds).

  17. So POSH is really actually POSHTML, which is an even less semantic acronym, since semantic HTML is far from a PoS.

  18. Pingback: by-expressions » Blog Archive » Is your site POSH

  19. Pingback: Being Amber Rhea » Blog Archive » links for 2007-05-03

  20. @Ragdoll> Absolutely. In fact, POSH is really just CSS (Common Sense Stuff)

  21. The more acronyms, the better, I say! Marketing being as important as it is today, I say we embrace it as a tool for progress in the field.

    Furthermore, I suggest someone come up with an online acronym generator. We would call it the “Completely Reliable Acronym Producer.”

  22. I need to POSH up my site! No, wait, I need to get it re-launched first!! And that’s proving tricky…(as you can see on my Flickr) 🙁

    …so I’ll POSH it later then. Good one.

  23. Pingback: Mark Beveridge » Links 2007-05-04

  24. POSH? Really? I mean, really?? Has innovation really run dry in our community to the point that we now have to re-brand things and sell them as new?

    I call BS.

  25. Aaahh!!! indeed.

    The trouble with this acronymn is that is conflicts with the original POSH: Port Outward, Starboard Homeward.

    There are some that actually associate the original meaning when they stumble across the word, ‘posh’. ‘Posh’ also retains the socio-politico-financial connotations of the original acronym. Is that the kind of statement you want to make?

    The point of communication is to get a specific meaning across to at least one other individual. If anyone uses the word ‘posh’ now, would you know what they meant? Or does it end up confusing the issue?

    Which is why I no longer use the word ‘hacker’ as there are far too many various definitions; I can no longer be certain that the person receiving my communication perceives it in the way I meant it.

    I’m not against acronyms, I just think that new acronyms should avoid conflicting with pre-established well-known concepts.

  26. Oh dear. I really hope this isn’t supposed to be serious. What utterly pointless patronising nonsense.

    Marketing isn’t the average geek’s forte, is it?

  27. Pingback: porkandpaws » Blog Archive » I admire the P.O.S.H people but worry about HTML 5 and require help

  28. I really hope this is a joke. The only thing this acronym does is help wannabe developers brag about themselves. Just learn HTML and shut the hell up. By the way, your CSS isn’t even “POSH”.

  29. I’m not a big fan of buzzwords and buzzphrases, particularly because you could just say “semantic” or “appropriate” instead and not have to explain it every time you mention it. However, whatever I can do to increase use of semantic HTML is good enough for me.

    @Scott:
    Yeah, don’t even tempt the thought of getting semantic HTML in HTML 5 (Web Apps 1.0). They’re keeping tags like “b” and “i” alive and using dedicated class names instead of the W3C’s role idea. Personally, I’m not a big fan of their spec (there are some faults with XHTML 2 too, but not so flagrant).

  30. Pingback: Vorsprung durch Webstandards | POSH: Wenn Websites zu Spice Girls werden

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  32. thanks for good write

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