Re: Search Engine CSS

Craig Francis wrote:

> 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").

There is no one true correct way of doing anything within the limited 
vocabulary offered by HTML. Whether something is an H1 or H2 will matter 
to search engines, but it's only one of many "ingredients" that will 
influence a page's ranking and indexing.

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

Presentation may affect *subjective* interpretation, but meaning should 
not be imparted solely via styling. A document needs to be 
understandable without styles.

> 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">).

This goes outside of the www-style list...the www-html list may be a 
more appropriate forum for this. Suffice to say: HTML offers a very 
limited set of elements. Beyond microformats or similar attempts at 
cramming further semantics into the very generic elements, or using 
linked resources (such as RDF files, for instance), there's not much you 
can do - and even there, you're relying on search engines actually 
caring about any of those things. As an aside, I remember how at some 
point MAP was touted as being a good markup structure for navigation etc...
You may want to look at the proposed developments in XHTML 2.0 
(specifically the "role" attribute and navigation list element)

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Wednesday, 5 July 2006 23:33:26 UTC