I've a follow up question about the structure of HTML. It is it better
to have a lot of empty tags, like this:
<h1></h1>
<h2></h2>
<h2></h2>
Or to have non-empty div tags like this:
<div class="headline1">Welcome to this site!</div>
<div class="headline2">Top stories:</div>
It occurs to me that the PHP code might just print the content, like:
$dbArray = $sql->getWeblogContent();
extract($dbArray);
<h1> $headline </h1>
<h2> $subheadline1 </h2>
<div> $maincontent </div>
In this way, the graphic designers who design the sites could have
total freedom about what HTML tags they wrap that code in. They'd
write all the tags themselves. However, sometimes there would be no
content and there would be a lot of empty tags. How bad is that? Is
Google smart enough to simply ignore empty tags?
The other possibe strategy is to have the code print nothing if there
is nothing to print, like this:
$dbArray = $sql->getWeblogContent();
extract($dbArray);
if ($headline) echo "<h1> $headline </h1>";
if ($subheadline1) echo "<h2> $subheadline1 </h2>";
if ($maincontent) echo "<div> $maincontent </div>";
The advantage of this is there are no empty tags, the disadvantage is
that the HTML is hard-coded, and the graphic designer can't change any
of it. And, as this thread makes clear, some designers will take issue
with the choice of tags. More so, true freedom of design should mean
changing those tags. On my own personal site, the weblog title is 12px
and the each weblog entry title is big. I'd use a <p> tag for the
weblog title and an <h2> for the weblog entry title. But on most
sites, the weblog title is the biggest thing on the page, and the
entry titles are more like 12px.
The question, really, is how damaging is it to the sense of
"structure", when speaking of a structured document, to have a lot of
empty tags? Toby's convinced me that the empty tag approach is best
because of the need to maximize the freedom of the designers. More so,
if the code writes no tags, then the separation between code and
design is cleaner. But, again, I wonder if it is considered poor form
to have a lot of empty tags on the page?
