Re: Search Engine CSS

Thank you Patrick,

A fair point, but please can you explain which is the correct method  
of marking up the headers (first example given, under the heading "my  
problem").

This was the problem I was facing which lead me to think about the  
power of CSS and its ability to present data in different ways to  
different devices.

Personally I think presentation effects interpretation, and the rules  
I propose are for changing that interpretation and not the structure  
of the page.

For example a <ul> of links is because they are an unordered list of  
links... its then presented to the user/device to show that its a  
navigation bar... but I suppose that interpretation could also be  
expressed in mark-up. Although how would you create all the HTML  
elements required for all the different data types (there could be  
allot)... I suppose they could be attributes (<ul type="nav">).

Craig







On 5 Jul 2006, at 23:39, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:

>
> Craig Francis wrote:
>> I have recently been thinking about how search engine spiders  
>> index a website.
>> At the moment we can provide ways for the spiders to find the  
>> page, but I do not think its possible for us to tell the spider  
>> things like where the navigation bar is (as I think it should be  
>> indexed differently to the main content of the page).
>> I have written a fairly small document explaining how a future  
>> version of CSS could help present the documents structure and data  
>> to search engine spiders in a better way than their current  
>> guesswork methods.
>> It would be great if you can give me some feedback.
>> http://www.krang.org.uk/searchEngineCSS/
>
> You're proposing the use of CSS to impart semantic meaning (e.g.  
> content: keywords and importance: 1) and behaviour (e.g. links:  
> ignore)? Sorry, but this is certainly beyond the scope of what CSS  
> should do.
>
> And no, the speech output CSS rules are not comparable: they define  
> how something should be presented, aurally...not what the meaning  
> or behaviour are.
>
> P
> -- 
> Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Wednesday, 5 July 2006 23:12:38 UTC