Semantic Markup: Is it worh it?

After writing a simple page such as About, I ran it through the W3C Markup Validator with the Show Outline option ticked to get their slant on the page.



Everything is kosher up until the outline for Graphic Software, then the sidebar headings bled into it. The headings for the sidebar are just general placeholders for menu text to be defined later (as the site progesses).

After seeing this, there seems to be two courses of action to take. One is the easiest, the other is more progmatic.

The easy approach

Easily enough, I can simply change the heading of the sidebar to an H2. This would put the lists in that area within their own 'section' and seperate from the post itself.

The downside is that every post that I make will have this sidebar 'attached' to it in some way. I am not sure if I want that attachment, but semantically it does make some sense.

The harder approach

Since the sidebar is set up as Php include, I can perform a little magic with it. For example there can be 'targetted' topical links included in the sidebar.

This would require a little more effort on my part, but one that I am sure that I can overcome.

I do know that Blogger will publish seperate "tag lists" for the blog posts. How you can discern them from the regular RSS feed is questionable. You would have to take the published Html pages and convert them into an actual feed.

My Sidebar is already set up for the challenge. It is adaptable. It only needs a little encouragement.