- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2004 08:42:33 +0100 (BST)
- To: www-style@w3.org
> > > | Kiarra: > | Wouldn't it be better if there could be a way to tell text browsers and > screen readers what to display first? You put it first. That's for two reasons: 1) it allows simple browsers to be simple (the HTML concept is of plain text simply marked up, so even a plain text viewer ought to allow most pages to be read easily, and in a sensible order); 2) it causes the important material to be displayed first on all browsers (even if designers currently abuse tables in a way that prevents incremental rendering). (In my view there are two reasons why this becomes an issue at all: 1) Early GUI browsers saw themselves as being in the page description language market, so failed to implement non-page description like elements, in particular link. An imaginative implementation of link rel=contents would have brought up the contents page as a navigation window, and there would have been no *need* for repeating the information in every page. 2) Designers hate having a consistent look and feel with competing sites, so they won't be happy with any attempt to implement link imaginatively now. If link automatically pulled in the contents page from the beginning, it is just possible that they would have worked within that model and limited their branding to contents page, not how it was displayed in relation to the detail page.)
Received on Sunday, 3 October 2004 07:42:35 UTC