Rodent Regatta

I realized again tonight that I don’t really understand the use of header tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.). I use a fair number of blockquotes. Within a blockquote, I may have a style or two that should be marked up using header tags. The discussion I’ve linked to at Jon Hicks’s site simply confirms how little I understand.

I’m told you need to use header tags in order on a page; you shouldn’t have an h3 if there’s not an h2 somewhere on the page before it. It seems like a really complex matter to decide (and be limited to) the use of only six header tags. If you’ve got a header on the home page, it might be the h1 tag. Each title might be tagged with h2. The sidebar might use h3 and h4. Can you complete the stylesheet for blockquotes (and all other needs) with only the h5 and h6 tags remaining.

I’m really confused about this stuff. I need to go back to the books. Which one?

Keith Robinson is thinking (aloud) about some possible ideas for refreshing his site. He’s even open to a change from Movable Type to a different weblog tool/CMS. The features he wants and the discussion in the comments is an enormous help to anyone contemplating design changes or tool changes or both.

What did I learn from a cursory glance? Apparently, Movable Type 3.1 will have functionality that eliminates the rebuild time when posting. WordPress and TextPattern already post instantly. It’s an important feature.

Eric Meyer refers us to a table where 10 web sites (mostly designers) are compared in a table of twenty-five characteristics. It’s useful, interesting and furthers the cause of web standards.

It seems to me that designers are nearing the point where a set of rules for ”proper” design will be accepted. These won’t be rules about colors or fonts, but rules about such things as links, character encoding, printing stylesheets, etc.

Things like ”clean URLs” or titles as URLs need to be nailed down. Basic navigation techniques need to be nailed down. These statements of preferred techniques don’t have to limit the artistic freedom designers have. Rather, it focuses more time on the graphic design, because the basics will be understood.

• * * UPDATE * * * Note the discussion by Dave Shea and Jon Hicks in response to their inclusion in the survey.

I’ve been listing site designs and specific features I like. I’m in the early stages of planning a site redesign. Pondering the obvious disruptions, inconveniences and ugliness that will happen if I undertake the changes myself, I’m also considering how I can learn design, if I continue to use professional design services. I’ve even put the sites I want to emulate at the top of my news reader. There are thirty great designs/designers on my ”top ten list.” I know.

In the last couple of days, I’ve been rereading Dan Cederholm’s sensational book. Then, just as I’m putting some more thoughts on paper, I run across Shirley Kaiser’s latest entry. She links to some very recent essays, articles and entries on web standards.

It’s great, and it will whet your appetite for what she’s planning to say on the subject in the coming days.

Doug Bowman of StopDesign uses the Microsoft site to explain why a standards-based, tableless design would be so much better than the current ”many-table” design.

In Throwing Tables Out the Window here’s an example of what he has to say:

The shame is that Microsofts site isnt as optimized as it could be. They havent taken the plunge yet. Users download unnecessarily larger pages, and servers waste extra bandwidth to keep up. At 40 KB, the HTML for Microsofts home page is not exactly a bloated beast. But it is burdened with inaccessible, kludgy, table-based markup filled with proprietary attributes and some awkward JavaScript. Notice I didnt mention whether it was valid markup or not. Despite using the flavor of XHTML, Microsoft omits the doctype on their home page.