Re: 1 webpage != 1 document

At 7:53 PM -0400 8/15/05, Bronwyn Boltwood wrote:
>
>Does anyone else agree that the "1 webpage = 1 document" idea is flawed?

Some related discussion:

One of the uses that motivated the inclusion of a 'role' attribute in XHTML 2.0
has been the designation of page-part roles such as "site navigation" or
"main content."

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-role.html#s_rolemodule

The Protocols and Formats Working Group working with the HTML Working
Group are very interested in getting the community to agree to use
some set of page-part notions in some reasonable way so that the
lumpy structure of web pages can be shared between authors and
adaptation tools.

http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/#current

The Device Independence Working Group also has been deconstructing the
idea of the web page as a monolithic resource.

http://www.w3.org/TR/di-gloss/

Also Google the following search string
   site:lists.w3.org Al Gilman pageAsView
... for some more, earlier rants

Al

>Over on the pmwiki-users mailing list, we're having a discussion about
>the use of heading tags in the sidebar and document structure.  You
>can read the thread at
>http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user/16355.  In
>short, the pmwiki-users list is trying to decide how do we keep
>headings used in the sidebar from wrecking the outline structure, and
>from "outvoting" the page's real name in search engine indexes.  So
>far the consensus is to stop using heading in the sidebar, and fake
>them with some other element.  I feel that this is a lesser evil,
>rather than a semantic improvement.
>
>As I see it, the root problem here is that the model of a what webpage
>is says that it's one document.  But when did you last see a
>well-designed live webpage that contained *just* one document?  If the
>W3C's site was constructed like that, we could only find other W3C
>pages if they were linked in the body text, because there would be no
>navigation links.  Logically speaking, navigation is never the page
>content proper unless the page is a sitemap.
>
>Best practice in web design demands plenty of site-related content in
>every page, such as the masthead and navigation bar(s).  There may
>also be document-related secondary content, like a sidebar for a
>magazine story.  Evidently, real webpages contain more than just one
>document each.
>
>Does anyone else agree that the "1 webpage = 1 document" idea is flawed?
>
>What if we had a way to mark content separate from the page's primary
>document, so that user agents can recognize these site-related and
>document-related chunks, and consider their heading structure
>separately from that of the primary document?
>
>Bronwyn

Received on Tuesday, 16 August 2005 13:58:19 UTC