On Jul 15, 2005, at 3:42 PM, Sean Montgomery wrote:
So what is wrong with using divs and spans? To me they are a far better container than the others for the reasons stated above. Just my 2 cents.
a) There's nothing "wrong" with it per se. To me they're just a confusing; they supply no information. It's rather like always using "x" for a variable name in a program. It's a question of personal style, at least until more than one person gets involved in the project.
b) Questions for you to answer for yourself (I don't care myself what your answers are, they're intended as a self-check so you can evaluate what you're gaining and losing with your process).
1) How do you want search engines to treat your pages? Some of them assign heavier "weighting" to text inside headers than "ordinary" text.
2) How do you want your page design to degrade? By using semantic tags, page renderers which do not understand CSS properly can still attempt to interpret the page and format it.
3) Will your page ever be "re-purposed" into something else? Proper semantic markup can help this because it gives a framework for another application to parse the page.
4) Will your work ever be maintained or analysed by someone other than you? If so, good semantic markup can help them understand what you're trying to accomplish on the page. It'll make life easier on those who come after you or beside you.
Aside from questions like this, there's no real advantage to using any HTML at all; You could have divs and spans as the sole HTML tags in the body, and do everything with CSS. For myself, though, I've had to recode completely too many times. Even if I don't see a future "re- purposing" of the site content, I'll go with proper semantic markup, Just In Case. But you're free not to. Just don't expect me to wade through all the divs and spans trying to figure out what's happening and why.
As for the "clean slate" bit, that's easily controlled in the original design process. If the first step is to properly apply semantic markup to the content, then you'll immediately see what it looks like unstyled, and you can move forward from there. At any time in the process, you can always comment out the CSS (my favorite technique is to rename the CSS file with a "no" in front of it; it reminds me that I'm not using it) and review. No muss, no fuss.
My apologies, this post has strayed away from practical CSS into design theory. I'll sit down and shut up now.
Have Fun, Arlen ------------------------------ In God we trust, all others must supply data ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
