I realize now how right you are when it comes to making final choices
about how a web page should be designed. Suppose something is the
banner for the page. It is the most important thing on the page. Then
it should be in an <h1> header. Something is a subheader. Then it
should be in an <h2> or <h3>. There is a list of options - no need for
it not to be in <ul>.
I get that now. You are all designers, and this is the way you think.
I started off thinking you were idiots, but now I realize that the job
of a designer is to make decisions just like this - the intelligent
discernment of what information has weight. In web design, one has to
make those discernments, then back them with the right kind of tag.
You are all in the business of final-output decisions.
Since the designers working on our control panels are working on final
designs, they should be making those kind of final-output decisions. I
only now realize they extent are still coding in the old style.
My perspective is different from the perspective of a designer because
mostly I program. We work to have a system that a graphic designer can
customize. I take out hard codings where I can, but much remain. It is
a shame, but it is a convenience, and for a small shop, convenience is
a powerful incentive. Not just for us, but for every small design shop
in the world that might use our product. Our goal has always been to
come up with a set of tools that would work well inside of
Dreamweaver, and anyone using Dreamweaver is going to put a premium on
convenience, or otherwise they would not be using Dreamweaver.
I use div tags for everything because it offers neutrality. It would
be wrong if I made final-output decisions and hardcoded that into the
software. What if I thought the web page headline was more important
than an entry headline but then some graphic designer wanted to do a
design that went flatly against my assumption. I fear someday seeing a
style sheet like this:
h1.webpageHeadline{
visibility:hidden;
line-height:0px;
}
h4.entrySubheading{
font-size: 120px;
font-weight: bold;
}
Here is a site that is being designed so that the entries are
important and the page title has been made invisible. In fact, my own
personal website is designed like this. But would Google understand
this? Would Google understand that on this website, the empty <h1> has
no importance, and the <h4> tag should be treated as if it was h1?
Rather than guess wrong, when I have to hardcode some code, I prefer
to put everything into div tags. They offer a neutrality of judgement.
