Obviously there are some benefits for screen readers and search engines, but these uses should be explicitly checked for as part of a QA process instead of relying on some vague standard of semanticness.
Things like marking up addresses, phone numbers - as examples - means that a search engine can log a website as associated with a particular address, a browser can link to enable a number displayed to be called direct.
If for example there was a microformat (or other semantic markup) for opening times then SE/social sites could read and display (and update) that info without owners having to go on 20 sites if they change opening times.
Of course it can also help infer which parts of a page are advertising, or impressum, and not render that.
A plugin could offer to work on tables, or import them to a spreadsheet.
Lots of scope for advanced automations.
I look at 'div soup' HTML and shudder. The authors of it have not got a clue. They also make it hard for people who do write proper HTML with the correct tags, styling the elements and keeping the separation of concerns to do anything with it.
It is about organising your content, if everything is in div tags you might as well just upload JPGs of your web pages, with different ones for desktop and mobile.
Another game changer is CSS grid. You no longer need wrapper divs to do very basic tasks such as centering content. In fact content with horrible divs everywhere is a nightmare to style up with CSS grid.
An example of this is a basic form. With just the form elements and labels you can get it looking sweet in next to no time with CSS grid.
However, if some zombie has put lots of spans and divs around the form elements and done the labels wrong then you have to choose either to rebuild the backend thing that churns out the form or just style it up lame block layout style.
Pseudo selectors are also cool, there is no need to have silly 'i' elements and spans to put that asterisk after 'required'.
Some people like to keep it simple, doing HTML properly, others want to pootle along with their divs and class attributes. I know what will look good in ten years time and what will look outdated.
HTML5 introduced many features but the main course was the semantic elements. You can and you should write web pages with these elements and also be thinking in terms of them.
You may scorn the accessibility aspect but accessibility is easy if you use the right elements. Why would you not want to have it? There is also the mindset that goes with it - the web is for everyone, not just rich, white, English speaking males with perfect eyesight.
The article is spot on and extremely well said. Styling elements rather than make believe classes is particularly well said.
I would say that people who create div soup HTML should be banned from the internets, the work practices of overly complicating everything has been going on for too long.
I don't even regard div soup web pages as proper web pages, it is like comparing beige deep-fried processed food with freshly prepared from ingredients food.
That was not so uncommon in 1999 :-(
Seriously, it's 2019 and some developers still don't get the value of semantic markup while this has been beaten to death for at least 20 years. this profession is cluttered with too many tourists. I even talk with devs bragging about the lack of care for markup.
Google don't care about HTML as they are way too clever for that. If I had more time I would like to see how they would rank two identical pages, one done properly and one that was a JPG image with a dangleberry of JSON-LD tacked on. I bet they latter would fare better!
If you don't follow semantic html at all I don't see how QA can safe you, except for QA telling you to fix that <div> by replacing it with a <button> (or <div role="button">, or <a> or whatever you prefer).
When an alternate display method comes out and wants my semantic html, I will add it to my QA workflow and make sure that it looks good instead of relying on some vague standard of semanticness from one of many bloggers.
Sure it's mostly black text on white backgrounds with only minor typesetting differences between elements but as a means to present information it has worked since the mid 1400s...
The more page authors use html 'properly', the more incentive there will be to improve systems like reader view.
This comment made me realize how relative everything is. It seems it was yesterday, when you would open Mosaic and slowly discover completely different worlds, one after another, and you'd never think of complaining HTML was aesthetically unpleasant...
After you've written the application? That makes absolutely no sense, unless you enjoy renaming lots of elements.
> instead of relying on some vague standard of semanticness
It's not vague, there is an actual international standard... WCAG!
It's for software reading the page and making use of the extra information, e.g. a screen reader being able to tell a user that there's a navigation element on the site and being able to jump there. Reader modes knowing what the main article on the page is. ...
(EDIT: I see you edited that point in, so yes, that's the main one, and IMHO a good enough one)
You see this in all professions and without exception, from the exercise industry, to trades like plumbing, to healthcare and everything inbetween. Most of it is bullshit, process-based job security theater. Most major guilds just end up developing higher level cartel-like certification protections to keep them economically secured from competition.
At one point there was a kind of hope that semantic tags would make web content easily machine-parseable, unlocking a bunch of meaningful content reuse somehow that better semantics would make possible. (Big data, ML and all that.)
The two canonical examples being that lists were important so software could extract meaning from list items, and not using tables for layout so software could trust tables actually had meaningfully tabular data.
But... that never really happened, it's not clear it ever will, and it doesn't benefit the content author directly anyways, so... yeah.
(Like you say, screen readers are the main thing, so use the tags and attributes that are important to screen readers, like buttons and alt text... but that's a very specific subset. A screen reader certainly doesn't care if you use a <div> or an <li> or a <td>.)
Edit: I stand corrected on my example, for <td> specifically I forgot <table> lets screen readers navigate vertically and also read column/row labels.
In which current screen readers is that statement true? (I'm fairly sure the answer is "none", but ...)
It absolutely does. Try firing up a screen reader before you make such comments spreading misinformation.
For example, it's maddening to see people now making tables out of flexbox grids and such. In a screen reader you can navigate a <table> in two dimensions (rows and columns). The flexbox variety completely breaks navigating up/down columns.