Re: Disturbing trend in tables

Search Engine Simulator is at URL:  <http://www.delorie.com/web/ses.html>
Related to this thread, DJ also offers a "backwards compatibility viewer"
and Lynx emulator.
Also, don't for the W3C Validator!  It includes a checkbox for "Show an
outline of this document" which primarily relies on header tags (and other
structural elements).

From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
Message-Id: <200101201244.f0KCiE421506@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 12:44:14 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: Re: Disturbing trend in tables

> Now some folks might argue that it's no big deal if the headers are
> indicated. That you can use the page just fine without that extra
> organizational information. But if I'm an author of text, and I decide my

There are at least two tools, Amaya and html2ps, that extract the header
information to construct an outline of the document for quick navigation,
and to provide contents lists in printed versions.  The html2ps outline
becomes a PDF collapsible outline if you convert the resulting PostScript
to PDF.  D J Delorie, in his search engine simulator page (sorry no
URL easily to hand) suggests that some search engines construct their
summaries from the headings.

It's this sort of additional processing that is possible that provides
hidden benefits from having !
structure *and* semantics - it needs XHTML,
not just XML, to provide the pre-defined semantics for this.

Received on Monday, 22 January 2001 09:29:07 UTC