The "semantic" part was what eventually became W3C's RDF stuff (a pet peeve of TBL's predating even the Web). When people squeeze poetry, threaded discussion, a

The "semantic" part was what eventually became W3C's RDF stuff (a pet peeve of TBL's predating even the Web). When people squeeze poetry, threaded discussion, and other emergent text forms into a vocabulary for casual academic publishing and call that "semantic HTML", that still doesn't make it semantic. The "strict markup" part can be (and always could be) had using SGML which is just a superset of XML that also supports HTML empty elements, tag inference, attribute shortforms, etc. HTML was invented as SGML vocabulary in the first place. Agree though that Google derailed any meaningful standardization effort for the readins you stated. Actually, it started already with CSS and the idioticy to pile yet another item-value syntax over SGML/HTML, when it already has attributes for formatting. The "semantic HTML" postulate is kind of just an after-the-fact justification for insane CSS complexity that could grow because it wasn't part of HTML proper and the scrutinity that goes with introducing new elements or attributes with it.