Meta-information coming to HTML coding

Today, most HTML web pages contain tags that are mostly related to layout: you have headings, paragraphs, tables, bold text and so forth, but only very little information about what is actually being shown on the page. This makes it tough for computers and search engines to figure out what your web page is really about.

Enter meta-information or metadata. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have teamed up and created a specification for HTML pages that brings semantics to the regular HTML code. Utilizing extensions on HTML 5, you can for example specify that you page is about software development, you are showing example code in the C# programming language, and so forth. This makes it much easier for web crawlers to meaningfully index your pages.

My take is this: in the future, adding such sematic information to your pages will become the norm. If nothing else, search engine optimization (SEO) is a key motivator.