The HTML structuring language has gone through a major change over the last couple of years. There are many new elements that are now used to structure pages and if you are not following "Best Practices" for the structure of the pages you will begin to see SEO hits beginning in January on your sites. The major search engines have been warning about this for over a year.
That date has been put out there for over a year and obviously they mean it as they are already warning people about the alt tags, accessibility, screen readers, etc. Just run a test on an older site from one of the major search engine test apps and you will see exactly what I mean about how and what they are looking for. It is not a simple or easy process to stay up to date and compliant.
That is one of the two big reason I stay away from Joomla and WordPress and the other large CMS systems. They are so big with code and bloat they just cannot keep up with the changes that are taking place in the proper structure of web pages and site design. If you are interested the other is security.
That is not to say that the web developers agree with all of the changes that are taking place as many of the changes in our opinion do not make a lot of sense and have not really been explained well for structure. As an example, an article tag. If you look on a few different web standards sites, and these are the knuckleheads that are making the standards, many of them cannot agree on exactly how that tag should be used, and that is just one example of many of the issues that are occurring with the new standards.
But to state that there have not been many changes in the last few years is selling that person short on learning correctly. There have been 1000's of changes in how we implement style and structure over the last 5 years. There have been major changes in just the way that we handle navigation systems. Not to mention page responsiveness. Mobility issues a few years ago did not even exist and yet today if your site is not mobile responsive you take a huge hit in SEO.
That is one of the points I was trying to make with a lot of those classes. The vast majority of those classes do not even mention responsiveness or even discuss media queries, That is a large part of page design and structure.
PHP is in the process of going through a large development change/ upgrade with PHP7. Structural coding in a few years will become a thing of the past, everything is moving to Classes and Methods. Anyone that does not stay up to date with those changes will really be left behind. That will impact everything that we are doing with dynamic site design.
Now personally, these changes work great for me as many people will ignore what is coming down the road, even though they have been told for years, and my development business will have more work then we will be able to handle, I will be able to increase my staff and keep everyone busy as hell. I love it when a plan comes together. People love to procrastinate and think they can do it tomorrow, well tomorrow is almost here, and most web sites and web developers have not been preparing.
Staying on the leading edge of technology takes a lot of effort, you are constantly having to improve and increase your skills. In this technology, learning is a never ending process. We are always learning something new and trying to look for way to improve what is out there.
These changes are long overdue as they will get rid of a lot of the crap sites that are out there. They will improve the security of the good sites and make it much easier to catch the bad guys with all the changes that are coming in the meta data that is being captured from the sites. Have you looked at the new data that is being captured in the meta tags of sites beginning next year? If not you should! This will really put a serious hurt on those Black Hat knuckleheads that are out there scamming the system.
If you are going to learn to be a developer, learn the right way. Don't take short cuts. It will save you a lot of grief in the short run and lead to a very successful career in the long run.
