- From: Daniel Barclay <daniel@fgm.com>
- Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 15:12:06 -0400
- To: public-bpwg@w3.org
- CC: "Holley Kevin (Centre)" <Kevin.Holley@O2.com>, Luca Passani <luca.passani@openwave.com>
Holley Kevin (Centre) wrote: > .... When looking at the WURFL site I > note that the real content of the page (not the links or the photos but > the meat of the page ... i.e. text about WURFL ...) ... is towards the > bottom of the HTML. I rather suspect that HTML tools deliberately put > "meat" text at the bottom of the HTML. Why is this? If you're talking about CSS style information that is embedded in an HTML document, it's at the top of the document because of HTML format: The STYLE element has to be within the HEAD element, which is comes before the BODY element. If you're talking about the typically large amount of mostly redundant "branding" and navigation information that typically appears at the top (and frequently left) of pages: That's not a tool issue, that's a page design issue (or possibly a page implementation issue). Designers apparently think users need a link to everywhere from every single page (yes, okay, I exaggerate a bit), instead of just some "breadcrumbs" to show where you are within the site (and/or larger document) and a link or two up toward higher-level pages that provide downward (and sideways) navigation links. (I've seen pages where the common stuff filled up the entire browser window (even in a tall window) and you had to scroll down to find the page-specific data. Also, I thought I heard that, for accessibility by blind people using screen readers, some web pages have an internal link at the beginning of the page to jump past the redundant header crap and jump to the meat of the page.) > ...Or even allow > browsers to load ONLY the text in case they are not capable or bandwidth > constrained for receiving rich content descriptions? Content negotiation might be useful for that (if the web page and/or server was set up to send plain text when richer content wasn't wanted). > Or is it to do with the way we have crafted stylesheets onto > HTML? One choice in crafting a page is whether to embed the CSS style information in the HTML document or to put it in a separate document (which a non-CSS-capable browser wouldn't waste time retrieving). That also applies to most JavaScript code. > I also note that more and more websites are hard to view in smaller > windows as Daniel points out. One of the points of a Windows-based > system is that you can view several things at the same time! > Scrolling left and right in this situation is horrible! Absolutely! (Well, okay, not being able to see something at all is worse, but repeated horizontal scrolling is horrible.) Daniel
Received on Wednesday, 27 July 2005 19:21:13 UTC