- From: Patrick Lauke <P.H.Lauke@salford.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 10:05:15 +0100
- To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
> David Woolley > Link has essentially dropped out of the HTML series of specifications > because commercial web developers consider it of no value (no visual > effect). Dropped out of the specs? Last I looked, it was alive and well. You mean the elements have been ignored by most developers. What about META tags? They don't have a visual effect, but some commercial developers obsess about them ;) I'd argue that the one major factor that has kept LINK from being widely used in the past is the non-existent support (by which I mean "exposing it to the user in any reasonable sort of way") for LINK in IE (and less than obvious presence of LINK site navigation even in things like Netscape 6 etc). So it's a chicken/egg problem: until a critical mass of sites uses LINK relationships, IE won't support it...and as long as that's the case, adding proper LINKs to a site that you know is mostly visited by users with IE is a thankless task. > In my view that one has always been obvious to anyone who believes > HTML is about structure. The reason it hasn't happened is that > browsers are able to produce the wanted visual effect without it and > making use of it may constrain the layout options. Again, maybe I'm being too idealistic, but the situation *is* slowly changing, as more and more large sites are cleaning up their act...but we've still got a long way to go. Patrick ________________________________ Patrick H. Lauke Webmaster / University of Salford http://www.salford.ac.uk
Received on Wednesday, 27 April 2005 09:05:13 UTC