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

[Sameer Naik]

On Saturday 10 November 2007 4:18:41 am Victor Engmark wrote:
> 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.
> 
that's correct,  for the user profile management and stuff alike we should 
have a vertical menu. makes it easier to add new tabs into the menu, occupies 
less space and very much user friendly when you have quite a lot of menu 
tabs. imagine 10 tabs tiled horizontally, that would be real bad.

at the same time we could have a small horizontal tab menu just below and 
sticking the banner with links like about the project, feedback, faq's, 
license, etc. links that aid a new visitor to know about the project and its 
goals.

> 
> 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.
>

well the span's used in the layout were temporary and for experimental 
purpose, it was changed long before this mail was dispatched . just wanted to 
quickly see how the idea would come along. as of now it a UL list.

what do you suggest, should be turn off all styling activities and work on 
other more important stuff? how should we proceed?

> 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.

here's a link to the web developer plugin for firefox:
        https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

(right-click->CSS->disable styles->all styles)
well, you could use this feature of the web  developer plugin and let us know 
when there are inconsistencies between a styled version and an unstyled one.
we would work on it and get it fixed.

regards
~sameer
> 
> But, New Zealand calls. Good night and good month!
> 
> -- 
> Victor Engmark
>