Re: Web Standards and the new layout

["Curtis C. Hovey" <sinzui cox net>]

On Sat, 2003-07-26 at 03:09, Brian Kerrick Nickel wrote:
> > Someone has been telling you furphies, because (somewhat regrettably),
> > none one has paid any attention to search engine issues so far. If
> > anyone would like to propose goals for meta tags and such, or provide
> > some suggestions on that front, it would be greatly appreciated.
> It was just something I heard on Footnotes about search engines reading
> top to bottom for search relevance. Honestly, I don't think Google uses
> metatags.

It's been a year since I had a membership to www.searchenginewatch.com,
but this is what I recall when I was giving my web site,
www.timelife.com, the run down as to why it wasn't listed in searches.

Google doesn't read meta tags or comments, Inktomi,altavisita, most
others do.  

All spiders read to to bottom, and the words at the bottom of a long
page will not be indexed.  Putting scripts at the top the page is
unwise.

Google measures relevancy by the frequency of words and the number of
links to the page in the index.  Most other search engines rank words in
title, headings, and meta tags higher.

> > In fact, [...] regression now. ;-)
> Fair enough, I stand corrected.
> However, I just remembered the wonderful world of CSS @media, which
> would be ideal for cleaning up/tweaking pages for various media types.
> 
> > Actually, lots of pages do, because the content is exactly the same as
> > it used to be with the old design (only the layout was changed), which
> > had hideous graphical headers on every page.
> I'm just thinking about maintaining a well structured document. Every
> non-HTML document you produce in your life has a main header, so why not
> the HTML ones? I chose the gnome logo because it is in every page of the
> web site. Naturally pages *should* in most cases also have individual
> heading based on their individual purpose <h2 />
> eg.
>  <h1>GNOME Development Site</h1>
>  <h2>gnome-vfs Documentation</h2>

Finally, someone who agrees with me.  I've concluded that hell will
freeze over before sites do the right thing, but that doesn't mean stop
preaching the truth. ;-)

> > Not sure what you mean by 'pair' here, say again?
> Sorry, a <dt/><dd/> pair.
> The current structure is <dl><dt/><dd/></dl><dl><dt/><dd/></dl> when it
> should be <dl><dt/><dd/><dt/><dd/></dl>. (I think this was done for
> padding, but thats just a dd{padding-bottom:10pt;} .
> 
> > I think the use of id is pretty well justified in this context, given
> > that every element with an id is actually unique. We use classes where
> > there are multiple uses of that style, id when we are dealing with a
> > specific page element. We could make more use of selectors, depending
> > on compatibility, and the header needs some work as described above.
> I'd say 9 out of times this is true (are there even 10 uses in the
> page?), but I'm always thinking of the future (usually ignoring the
> present), and who knows, you may need to at some point add a second
> header, use a footer somewhere else, put a sidebar on the other side
> (see my example page), and then its nice to have some reusable,
> generalized classes already at hand rather than having to alter half the
> site.
> 
> > Not the sighted leading the sighted again? ;-)
> Only sometimes. We tend to be zealots over the whole table issue.
> 
> .Brian

-- 
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sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.