41 re: CSS and single owner publishing

It’s a bit off-topic, but what you’re saying really comes down to a more basic fear that professionally designed and developed websites may marginalize less professionally designed and developed sites. In the case of your amateur historian, Google is the ultimate arbiter. If your hypothetical historian has written text and meta data with half an eye on the way search engines work, his or her site will get plenty of traffic from Google and AllTheWeb and other well-made search engines. If the content has merit it will retain many of its visitors, though if it’s badly designed or has poor usability some percentage of those visitors will leave. Likewise if it’s badly written many visitors will leave. But none of that has much of anything to do with the comprehensibility of CSS1 and CSS2.

posted at 07:00 am on October 1, 2002 by apartness

42 IE6 is just plain wierd

Strange effects in IE6 seem to me to be common – I have an unordered list forming the menu down the left hand side at www.elandigitalsystems.com. I used CSS to make it change colors on roll-over and do other pretty stuff which is just great. However I did find that IE6 (and I think only IE6) knocks the top item in any list sideways.
Unable to find any solution I followed a kind suggestion from the CSS-discuss list to include a dummy list item at the top of each list and set display:none for this item in my CSS. That seems to look OK but I wish I knew what causes the problem…

posted at 10:02 am on October 1, 2002 by Robin

43 Breadcrumbs

Thanks for the article — it’s a very useful compilation and distillation of some valuable techniques.

I want to disagree on your proposed HTML markup for breadcrumbs. Each breadcrumb should be a list item, not a nested list. If I give you directions to my house, it’s a list of landmarks, not a hierachy of every street in the city.

I think, though, that it should be an ordered list, since it’s from top to bottom. Changing the order of the breadcrumb list would make a difference in the way it’s interpreted. CSS would hide the numbers and use symbols, as you’ve shown.

Just my 2 cents worth. I really appreciated the article because it so neatly traversed from theory to practical examples.

posted at 10:09 am on October 1, 2002 by Mike Combs

44 Re: Breadcrumbs

In reality, however, you cannot compare breadcrumbs to real-world directions, since your “list of landmarks” is only going to ONE area—your house. Whereas online, a website will have many more destinations, and would therefore use a nested navigational style to sort them. Breadcrumbs are usually used in a directories, your suggestion would probably be more appropriate as a navigation bar—or for giving directions. ;)

posted at 04:49 pm on October 1, 2002 by Louis St-Amour

45 Good work

I was thinking that ALA was slipping in content lately, but this was a fine article. Good work, ALA.

posted at 08:18 pm on October 1, 2002 by Spencer Fry

46 re: CSS and single owner publishing

apartness responded at http://www.alistapart.com/stories/taminglists/discuss/2/#ala-1013

I agree it is a bit off topic, but you refer to the search engines. That was exactly what was on my mind. Is well structured (X)HTML not one of the best ways to climb the rankings of the search engines?

And all of the other remarks about engaging writing – I totaly agree, but I had it taken as ‘ceteris paribus’ for the moment.

posted at 03:17 am on October 2, 2002 by Martijn ten Napel

47 Roll on

Mark’s article is excellent. It will prove to be a useful reference for me in the future. I’ve always had to wrestle with lists a bit and now Mark has given me some good pointers to make things easier.

I am looking forward to seeing what can also be done with the new <nl> element, to be introduced in XHTML 2.0:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-list.html#s_listmodule
Perhaps we will be able to enjoy JavaScript-free, drop-down menus sometime in the future.

posted at 04:47 am on October 2, 2002 by Simon

48 re: CSS and single owner publishing

Martijn ten Napel responded at http://www.alistapart.com/stories/taminglists/discuss/2/#ala-1019

Just to continue briefly with this “branch topic”, Martijn says “Is well structured (X)HTML not one of the best ways to climb the rankings of the search engines? “ I agree completely with this. A well structured document that is free of the bloat of presentational markup will probably get a higher ranking than documents that mix content and presentation because the information that is being sought will be more accessible to the search engine, as well as the user.

I believe that using list markup for creating navigation menus is good move, but it is also probably a good idea to move this markup to the end of a document and then use CSS-P to pull it back up to the top, if at all possible. That means that users with screen readers (and the like) need not be constantly wading through a navigation list everytime they click to a new page.

posted at 05:02 am on October 2, 2002 by Simon

49 This is all my fault.

Mark mentioned that I started the thread at CSS-Discuss. I’ve been working with ULs for quite some time now to create menus. Mostly due to accessibility reasons. And one day, driving to work, listening to Ryan Adams, I thought to myself, “Why couldn’t you make tabs with a UL and some CSS?” So I whipped something up, posted it to my site, http://www.r2communications.com/cssTests/tabbedMenu.html and posted it to the list. I was quite impressed in how people took it and ran with it. Great article, Mark.

posted at 08:31 am on October 2, 2002 by Randal Rust

50 Definition Lists

Uwe von Loh wrote in http://www.alistapart.com/stories/taminglists/discuss/2/#ala-999

Definition lists are perfectly fine and not deprecated. However, I find that they’re missing something semantically. You see, there no simple validating markup possible to semantically group dts with corresponding dds. you can’t wrap a <div class“definition-entry”> around each pair of <dt>-<dd> since dls can only contain dts and dds.

posted at 12:11 pm on October 2, 2002 by Eugene