‘standards’ archive

Advancing the Web – Part 1 of 2

CSS 3 and HTML 5 are somewhere down the chute, and will eventually be widely supported. Both are highly anticipated. Both address a lot of today’s problems in the web design world. But neither is good enough.

I know I’m not the first to bang on this drum. In fact, I’m basically about to parrot back the biggest complaints. The reason for this is that I haven’t seen the problems of both specs brought to light in the same place, which seems like a rather glaring mistake; they need to work hand-in-hand. Solving the issues of only one does not fix the whole problem.

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While the debate has been raging on, I have had to stop myself repeatedly from posting a fury of twitter feeds because, well, my thoughts on the matter just don’t fit in 140 characters.

Indicate the Page Content

I fall well into the h1-title camp, and think wrapping an <h1> around the company name or, even worse, the company logo image is a blatant bastardization of the tag’s purpose. It’s meant to indicate to the reader what the bulk of content on the page is about, and, while that likely is the company name on the index page, it is certainly not so on most (if not all) of the other pages on the domain.

Search Engine Optimization

I’m not really sure what triggered the Groundhog’s Day avalanche of discussion on this, but I have to address one argument the h1-logo proponents keep putting forward: search engine optimization. They argue that putting the <h1> around the company or website title helps search engines lead users to their page. I see two problems with this argument:

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