I moved in the database world at a time when a lot of people were discussing the question "what is a conceptual schema?", and I decided then that if people couldn't agree what the term meant, I wasn't going to use it. I avoid the term "semantics" for exactly the same reason. (Perhaps it even means the same thing. Assuming that meaning is meaningful.)

Michael Kay

Saxonica

On 8 Jan 2022, at 18:01, Tim Bray <tbray@t...> wrote:

Eighteen years ago, I wrote “On Semantics and Markup”: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/04/09/SemanticMarkup

I think I still mostly believe everything in that essay. It addresses three questions:

•  When is markup semantic?
• Is semantic-ness a binary condition?
• Where do semantics come from?

and ends with this summary: 

• Descriptive markup is better than the alternatives.