Are semantics and syntax the same?

Solution 1:

Syntax is the grammar. It describes the way to construct a correct sentence. For example, this water is triangular is syntactically correct.

Semantics relates to the meaning. this water is triangular does not mean anything, though the grammar is ok.

Talking about the semantic web has become trendy recently. The idea is to enhance the markup (structural with HTML) with additional data so computer could make sense of the web pages more easily.

Solution 2:

Syntax is the grammar of a language - the rules by which to form sentences or expressions.

Semantics is the meaning you are trying to express with your code.

Solution 3:

A program that is syntactically correct will compile and run.

A program that is semantically correct will actually do what you as the programmer intended it to do. i.e. it doesn't have any bugs in it.

Two programs written to perform the same task in different languages will use different syntaxes, but they would be the same semantically.

Solution 4:

If you are talking about web (rather than programming languages):

The syntax of the language is whatever the browser (or processing program) can legally recognize and handle, and render to you. For example, your browser can render HTML, while your API can parse XML trees.

Semantics involve what is actually being represented. There's a lot of buzz now about semantic webs and all that stuff, but it essentially means that each entity is also associated with some human-readable information or metadata, so that a certain tag would have a supposed meaning and refer you to it.

Social networks are the same story. You put knowledge in the links

Solution 5:

"An ant ate an aunt." has a correct syntax, but will not make sense semantically. A syntax is a set of rules that can be combined to produce infinite number of gramatically valid sentences, but few, very few of which has a semantics.