A well structured document is better understood by the reader than a
non-structured or poorly structured one.

Now, if you style your h1's etc. to look exactly like your regular text,
then your structure disapears for those using sight to view your pages.
That's poor design.

Conversely, if you do not use structure/headings and you style some of your
text to appear as headings, by increasing their font size or making them
bold, then your structure disapears for those using non-graphical means to
"read" your page. That's also poor design and poor accessibility.

And finally, I think you miss the point about being backward compatible. If
you use CSS and the correct html tags for headings and text, your
well-intended "design" may not translate in a pre-CSS browser, but your text
(and hence, your information) WILL BE backward compatible.

---------------------------------------------------------
Chuck Evans
Web Marketing Manager
Captura Software, Inc.
(425) 424-1155
chucke(at)captura.com
www.captura.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Benoit [mailto:pbenoit(at)triton-network.com]

That's all well and good if we write "dumb" pages, but what's considered to
be valid structure and what's considered to be valid HTML are sometimes
completely different things.

Do I really care if my webpages will load correctly in a text only browser?
No, of course I don't, and if I went over most of your pages I'm sure that
I'd see the same thing.  Excluding Harold's of course. ;)

So there's style to the structure.  What good is the structure if you can
completely alter it's style?  You make it whatever you want by defining it.

Non-CSS capable browsers?

Is there really such a thing anymore?  Sure, lets argue that we all have to
spend an extra week twinking our pages so that they view the same in
Netscape 2 as they do in IE 5.5.  Ya right, that'll happen.

Backwards compatability.  All well and good.  More like feelgoodism, than
having any use.  "I'm making my page compatible with the universe, no matter
what they view it with, and I'm maintaining the integrity of the web by
doing so!"

Blah, what a bunch of hooey.  Sounds like backwards moving to me.

So is HTML structure really that important?  Will you really get ranked that
much better if you use <H3> instead of <P class="myH3class"> ?  I doubt it
would effect your ranking THAT much.  Imagine if you used no header tags at
all!  You'd never get ranked! ;)

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