Re: <div>s based layout -- HTML 4.01 Strict

[Victor Engmark]

On 11/9/07, Davi Leal <address@hidden> wrote:

> > 3. Horizontal links and login menus (???).

IMHO a vertical menu is a lot better:

  * Adding too much areas as horizontal will steal a lot of space
    forcing to the user to scroll sooner. We should have a
    not-too-much tall heading.

The reason I argued for it was just because it's simpler, which I think would make it easier to focus on the content. I've always found that building web pages from scratch without any styling other than the browser default makes it easier to judge how good the markup & content are. It's one of the reasons I discovered <fieldset>, <kbd>, <label>, and friends :)

E.g., you can style just about anything to look like a menu, but IIRC, the current layout just uses <span>s, so if you look at it without formatting it looks like just another sentence. And for a search engine, that's what it'll be indexed as. Ditto for any devices which don't support CSS. But if you look at the page without CSS, you'll easily see that <ul> would be more natural. After all, any menu (horizontal, vertical, or otherwise) is just an unordered (occasionally ordered) collection of related links.

Maybe I'm just rambling, but try to turn off styles (not sure if you can turn off inline styles though) with the Web Developer extension for Firefox. The page should still make exactly as much sense, even if it looks bad.

But, New Zealand calls. Good night and good month!

-- 
Victor Engmark