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Reading this, does anyone else get a sinking feeling regarding the chances of semantic markup succeeding?

It's too easy to get it wrong and the subtleties are, well, too subtle.

It's never going to work.

I felt the same way. It's hard enough to remember the subtleties of CSS and which order the table tags go in. The header tag makes my head hurt(no pun intended).

Among them is probably not how to prevent your service from collapsing under load.

Edit: It's back up now.

Mistakes? Hmm... Bad style, maybe, but hardly mistakes. They certainly aren't causing any harm.

This is obviously to code purists -- which I am. IMHO, it's way better to know what you're doing. They certainly aren't causing any harm, but we all have seen things like:

<span class="title">Article title</span>

And the guy who did it says it's the same as using an <h1>, since the font size attribute is the same. If they don't understand the value of a semantic code, they will just see that the site is showing up more or less the same in the browsers and that's good for them.

Very interesting article, but what about the <menu> element, what's the difference between this and the <nav>?

Avoiding common HTML5 mistakes