Arguments for stuctural markup?

[Juha Häikiö]

In my organisation, most html-authors use WYSIWYG-editors and
are not too acquainted with the concept of html.

I'm having a hard time trying to convince them of the benefits
of structural mark-up. When I tell that <P><FONT SIZE=+2> is not
same as <H2>, the answer is 'So what? Maybe not, but it looks OK.
Too much trouble to make any changes now'.

So, please tell me: what makes the misuse of html so deprecated?
Why is the <FONT>-tag so bad? People can access unvalid html
and plain text documents as well as valid html-documents. Do the
existing search engines _really_ concern with logical headings?

Juha H&auml;iki&ouml;

[Steve Pugh]

Your last question raises the point which is the one argument that
actually seems to have some effect on even the most boneheaded.
Search engines do give more priority to headings than the ordinary
body copy - and <FONT SIZE="+2"> is just ordinary body copy.

Steve

[Christian Davén]

> In my organisation, most html-authors use WYSIWYG-editors and
> are not too acquainted with the concept of html.
>
> I'm having a hard time trying to convince them of the benefits
> of structural mark-up. When I tell that <P><FONT SIZE=+2> is not
> same as <H2>, the answer is 'So what? Maybe not, but it looks OK.
> Too much trouble to make any changes now'.
>
> So, please tell me: what makes the misuse of html so deprecated?
> Why is the <FONT>-tag so bad? People can access unvalid html
> and plain text documents as well as valid html-documents. Do the
> existing search engines _really_ concern with logical headings?

HTML is a descendant of SGML, in which you don't mix document structure with
layout. The FONT tag has never been fully accepted by HTML puritans, and
when you see splendid HTML 4 code (using cascading style sheets) you'll
understand why. The code is so much cleaner than when using hundreds of FONT
tags, and WYSIWYG editors like FrontPage likes to add a couple of
meaningless FONT tags for whitespaces.

When using headings the appearence will be decided by the browser (when not
using style sheets), and because of that I've stopped using them. Netscape
likes to add some margin below all headings, and when setting margin-bottom
to ANY value it's suddenly NO margin below them. (This applies to paragraphs
as well.)

Christian

[Jukka Korpela]

Hon. usenaut "Juha Häikiö" <juha....@stuk.fi> wrote in message
<7p0id6$7r$1...@ankka.csc.fi>:

>I'm having a hard time trying to convince them of the benefits
>of structural mark-up.

Some of them will learn, some won't. My estimate is that it takes two
or three years for a clever person to get the idea. (I almost did it
in four years.) Take it easy. People don't want to learn. Consult
Dilbert comics every day to remain sane.

>When I tell that <P><FONT SIZE=+2> is not
>same as <H2>, the answer is 'So what? Maybe not, but it looks OK.
>Too much trouble to make any changes now'.

Try suggesting them that the Web pages be removed if nobody has time
to fix them, still less to maintain them. Only if you yourself are
permanently employed, of course.

>So, please tell me: what makes the misuse of html so deprecated?
>Why is the <FONT>-tag so bad? People can access unvalid html
>and plain text documents as well as valid html-documents. Do the
>existing search engines _really_ concern with logical headings?

(Try telling them they do. How could they know? We don't. :-)

Instead of answering these questions directly, I'd suggest a different
strategy. It has serious dangers, since it uses simple arguments. And
people who understand simple arguments tend to understand them wrong.
You have been warned.

Tell them that by using heading markup for headings, it will be much
easier to get the _presentation_ tuned. Everyone and his brother gets
bored with the style, if any, of a Web page. So use styles which let
you change the style in a minute!

If people consistently use heading elements for headings, and just
include a company-standard LINK element referring to a
company-standard stylesheet, it becomes so easy to change the
presentation of _all_ pages in the company simply by modifying the
stylesheet in a simple manner. Today, the company policy might be to
present all headings blinking red in 34pt font. Tomorrow, after losing
most of the customers, there will be unexpected mental sanity around,
and the new rule is to use a different scheme for headings, like a
sans-serif font in increasing size by heading level, some nice pastel
color as background, and text color not quite black. The next day
something different, and just because those presentational details
were not hard-coded!

--
Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/