Much like the cool name AJAX made DHTML seem sexy again, the standardista blogosphere has recently started pushing POSH as a new umbrella term for semantic markup good practice. I'm here to do my part to add what little weight I can to the meme.

Not surprisingly, the idea has come the the Microformats community - an IRC chat led to a dinner discussion IRL and that led to a wiki page. A blog post from Tantek and similar posts from others who were there added to the momentum and pretty soon there was also a Wikipedia page.

So how do you make your markup POSH? There is a handy checklist on the wiki page:

• The first rule of POSH is that you must validate your POSH.

• Second, drop the use of TABLEs for purely presentational purposes, spacer GIFs, and presentational-html in general.

• Next, fix your Bed and Breakfast markup.

• Eliminate Anorexic Anchors.

• Use good semantic-class-names.

Before you right click, view source and get all critical, I know my blog skin could do with some work in this regard, and I'll be getting to that real soon now I also have a terrible habit of creating class names like 'red_text' which I'm working to get out of. In the meantime, do as I say, not as I do!