There has been, of late, a significant gain in mindshare being enjoyed by a number of movements which call themselves Semantic $THING. These usually encode some extra meaning in content which otherwise exists. Commonly these are intended to make it easier for computers to read extra meaning into something intended for humans; but sometimes they're intended to allow humans to more easily deal with something meant for computers.

Semantics are, in a very basic sense, how meaning is overlayed onto the syntax of content. I like to think of it as: syntax is the 'how', but semantics are the 'what'.

Here are three Semantic $THINGs which I think you ought to know about:

• The Semantic Linefeeds concept is intended to make it easier for humans to grok the delta between two versions of a text file intended to be processed (for example markdown)

• The Semantic Versioning concept is intended to make it possible for humans, and software, to understand the relationship between different releases of a piece of software.

• The Semantic Commits concept is intended to make it easier to produce changelogs for projects and there's a number of tools built up around this.

If you know of any other useful Semantic $THINGs then why not comment on this article to let others know about them? For homework, I simply suggest you read the above linked articles, and then do a little of your own research around the topics and consider if you might need to take on any of the points in your own projects. I am considering semantic commits for my main projects at the time of writing this article.