Re: Search Engine CSS

Having now has the time to read Craig's linked document

> http://www.krang.org.uk/searchEngineCSS/

as well as his original posting, I for one would like
to add my support to his proposal, although I note that
most have been dismissive of his suggestions, some even
going so far as to suggest that CSS is totally inappropriate
as a mechanism through which to accomplish his aims.

What I suspect has been overlooked is his quite intentional
use of new values for the "media" attribute, and in
particular "spider" (though this could equally well be
"robot", or whatever).  Once one allows new values for
"media", the whole role of CSS takes on a new meaning,
and I think that Craig may well be one of the few to
identify this.

My only concern with his ideas is really at the nit-picking
level, where he adduces as evidence of the problem the
following markup fragment :

> 	<h1>Page Title</h1>
> 		    <h2>Sub Section Title</h2>
> 		        <p>...</p>
> 		    <h2>Sub Section Title</h2>
> 		        <p>...</p>
> 		    <h2>Sub Section Title</h2>
> 		        <p>...</p>
> 		        <h3>Page Navigation</h3>
> 		            <ul>...</ul>

Here I would propose two changes :

1) Make <H1> bi-valued, as in

	<h1>Site name : Page title</h1>

		and

2) Use <div>s to partition the document into "content"
and "navigation", rather than using "<body>" as the
sole primary container.

Thus I might express his re-worked markup as

	<h1>Site name : Page title>
	<div class="Content">
		<h2>Sub Section Title</h2>
			<p>...</p>
		<h2>Sub Section Title</h2>
			<p>...</p>
		<h2>Sub Section Title</h2>
			<p>...</p>
	</div>
	<div class="Navigation">
		<h2>Page Navigation</h2>
			<ul>...</ul>
	</div>

This, I believe, eliminates the semantic ambiguities
Of Criag's own re-worked markup, and makes the structure
clearer even without the use of spider-specific CSS.

Philip Taylor

Received on Friday, 7 July 2006 11:10:01 UTC