Do HTML tags flag semantic content

HTML tags are designed to support only the display of Web page content, but the study quantifies their feasibility as proxies for semantic content as well. More specifically, the author examined a number of Web pages to try to quantify whether, consciously or otherwise, authors use headings or the highlighted text accompanying a link to indicate the subject matter of the corresponding page. The investigations focused on empirically evaluating the feasibility of using key Web page elements as proxies to indicate page contents. Additionally, the author compared text retrieval by keyword. The author describes the methods he used and summarizes results. The empirical results suggest that text in HTML headings and in anchor texts is useful for indicating Web page content for logic programming.