Re: Proposal: [WWW] Seperate site and document

Alexander Christiaan Jacob wrote:

> 
> You can already get quite similar results using html:link (think 

That was my thought, too.  From a semantic point of view, there is no 
good reason for embedding navigation in each leaf page.

The problem with going the link way is, of course, that GUI browsers 
were really pretending to be page description language viewers so didn't 
consider link important.  As a result, web designers have now come to 
expect to embed the navigation in the page, rather than have the browser 
  automatically pull up an appropriate navigation window, and have taken 
advantage of that to make the navigation part of the branding of the 
page.  As such, for the popular web, it is going to be very difficult to 
fully separate navigation and content again.

Incidentally, in the original example, that still duplicates navigation 
on every page, it would have been better to put the navigation at the 
end of the document, as people go to leaf pages for the content. 
Designers might object to this, though, as it means that the navigation 
isn't there to attract people into the site when the page turns out not 
to be appropriate.  However, I don't think that really works for me, as 
I will click back anyway, and if they break the back button, I will be 
even more determined to get out of the site.


-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.

Received on Sunday, 20 January 2008 11:57:32 UTC