At Cre8asite Forums this week, a lengthy discussion on the ultimate value of pure CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) (Cascading Style Sheets) based layout over the use of tables has been taking place. Sometimes, living in the sheltered world of accessible and standards-based design, I can lose touch with the fact that many people out there simply don’t accept some of the same guidelines I work with every day — and that this does not, in any way, mean that they […]
Continue reading “Why not tables? Is CSS really better?” »Category: Semantics
Personal Names and Language Choice
I’ve been thinking about the language of personal names recently. Commonly, personal names don’t follow the pronunciation rules of their locality. My name is “Joe.” That’s an easy one. But you can’t be sure. My partner is named “Janna” — pronounced “Yahn-uh.” In this country, it’s the very rare exception when a stranger pronounces her name correctly. It’s embarrassing to mispronounce somebody’s name. Outside of a personal introduction, however, it can be very difficult to know how to pronounce personal […]
Continue reading “Personal Names and Language Choice” »Standards, Accessibility, and Search Engine Optimization
Robert Nyman has questions he’d love to have answered about SEO. I’m not the person to answer these questions, certainly, but I can certainly provide commentary. In particular, it’s nice to see people from the web standards community discussing search optimization. There’s no question that creating a website which applies web standards and the principles of accessibility also creates a nice landing spot for search engines. When you build accessibly, you remove barriers to access for search engines as well […]
Continue reading “Standards, Accessibility, and Search Engine Optimization” »Is a br tag semantic?
The <br /> tag seems to get short shrift a lot. Perhaps because it contains no content and appears to have no meaning within a document. You can’t communicate any of the information that a line-break contains structurally because it seems to be a purely presentational element. Robert Nyman boils the issue down to a number of different perspectives on line breaks: “no”, “yes”, “I don’t know”, and “who cares?” (Perspectives have been paraphrased. A lot.)
Continue reading “Is a br tag semantic?” »Semantic formatting for interviews
This is a question which came up once upon a time at Cre8asite Forums, and it intrigued me. An interview, next to a standard article format, is possibly the most common type of written document on the web. Interviews pretty much always follow a very straightforward sequence: Question and Answer. An interview may have one interviewer with one interviewee, or may have several of each. In either case, the tag should be able to support some form of citation to […]
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