-----Original Message----- From: Joseph Harris Sent: Monday, September 20, 2004 6:08 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [wdvltalk] RE: font meets font in css
I've put the page up on http://www.smilepoetryweekly.com/master%20-%20developing%20-%20css.htm if you care to have a look you can see how it is shaping. =========================================================================== A word about headings: an element which has actual semantic meaning. Headings are not intended as visual elements for setting font size. A heading is intended as an organizational device. Headings are nested such that all subheadings should relate back to the principal heading. In other words, anything following an h1 should relate to that h1 unless and until another h1 is encountered in the document. The W3C makes this almost clear in the discussion of headings at: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#h-7.5.5 The discussion of headings implies that the first heading must always be an h1 so unless Joseph has already declared an h1, say on the home page as "Smile Poetry", the use of an h2 for the first poem title would be incorrect, semantically. And of course if one argues that a document is a page and not an entire site, then each page would have to have an h1 before any subheadings could be used which makes Joseph's use of h1 as a poem title correct with whichever definition of document is used. One reason for all of that is that a user agent may use the headings to construct a table of contents for the site, according to the specs. Hence the semantic value of headings. In a similar vein, the reliance on anonymous boxes set off by span tags is not a good structure. Clearly what the document has is paragraphs relating to a central theme -- the poem identified in the h1 heading. So while span is technically correct here because anonymous boxes are allowed, it would add meaning and structure to the document to use the paragraph tag. In addition, since the paragraph and div tags are both block level, margin and padding could be applied to set spacing. This argument also applies to the opening paragraph in the div with its span tag. Put the class "central" in a paragraph tag. Again it will add meaning to the page. In fact all of the span tags should be paragraph tags. The reason for all this is so that a user agent of some sort -- browser, spider, researcher, etc -- can examine the page and find some clues as to the meaning of the page.. A search agent using xml could therefore extract a an h1 tag which is a poem title indicating the focus of the page and some supportive textual sample in a paragraph tag which would provide a flavour of your site. And of course if you were not a sighted user, the same structure would help make sense out of the page. And that is the purpose of xhtml and css in the semantic web: structural elements the predictable meaning of which provide clues to textual meaning when those clues are interpreted by a human. Joseph, that human-machine interaction is something a table design can never provide and is why table based designs are inherently flawed and inferior. drew ____ • The WDVL Discussion List from WDVL.COM • ____ To Join wdvltalk, Send An Email To: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Send Your Posts To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To set a personal password send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words: "set WDVLTALK pw=yourpassword" in the body of the email. To change subscription settings to the wdvltalk digest version: http://wdvl.internet.com/WDVL/Forum/#sub ________________ http://www.wdvl.com _______________________ You are currently subscribed to wdvltalk as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe via postal mail, please contact us at: Jupitermedia Corp. Attn: Discussion List Management 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Please include the email address which you have been contacted with.
