Importance of semantic correctness?

Question

Hello,

I had a question which I was wondering about. Being a web developer, semantic coding is hard wired into, I want to achieve layout in clean and pure way. 

When looking at app examples I also see they are all semantic, HTML5 elements are used such as "section" and  "header".

I was interested to know if semantic correctness effects the app in anyway in the store? Does the store check it to see each page has a h1 etc? Or is keeping to semantic standards purely just to make it easier to code, and cleaner to read?

Thanks

Answer 1

As for certification... no. You aren't going to fail certification for these reasons.

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Matt Small - Microsoft Escalation Engineer - Forum Moderator
If my reply answers your question, please mark this post as answered.

NOTE: If I ask for code, please provide something that I can drop directly into a project and run (including XAML), or an actual application project. I'm trying to help a lot of people, so I don't have time to figure out weird snippets with undefined objects and unknown namespaces.

Answer 2

My app is already in the store. I was just wondering if there were any other direct benefits?

Answer 3

Semantic correctness is very useful for accessibility: by using semantically correct elements a screen reader can know and describe what is going on in the app with minimal additional code. If you make everything a div then you will need to add significant semantic markup to describe the page to a screen reader.

As Matt says, semantic correctness is not required for certification (the cert tests don't look at your code, just the results).