> I'm not sure why you put so much emphasis on the common HTML tags -- there's nothing important or special about them.
First-time poster, and I love your writing, so excuse me if this seems harsh, but WOAH.
There is most DEFINITELY something special about h1 - h7 tags and p tags, beyond "default styling". The web is ALL ABOUT semantics, and if you're just using styled divs around paragraphs, sure, it'll validate, but not a search engine in the world will understand your site. In HTML, <p> means "here is some paragraph information, which relates directly to the previous hx tag, and is at level x of importance in this document". Search engines use this information to weight your content, but screen readers also use the information to allow you to skip paragraphs without leaving the flow of the document.
<div> tags, on the other hand, just say "here's some content, I don't know what it is" - it could be an image, a boxout, you name it. As said above, if all iWeb is doing is using <div>s, then the HTML is essentially worthless.
This might not be an issue in a photo gallery, but for something like a blog it's increasingly essential.
It took me a long time to get this "semantic" stuff, but once you do, it's difficult to put up with apps that trounce all over it. Anyway, enough ranting! It sounds like iWeb has enough solid grounding to allow it to become more semantic in 2.0, which can only be good :)
by Jonathan — Jan 17
First-time poster, and I love your writing, so excuse me if this seems harsh, but WOAH.
There is most DEFINITELY something special about h1 - h7 tags and p tags, beyond "default styling". The web is ALL ABOUT semantics, and if you're just using styled divs around paragraphs, sure, it'll validate, but not a search engine in the world will understand your site. In HTML, <p> means "here is some paragraph information, which relates directly to the previous hx tag, and is at level x of importance in this document". Search engines use this information to weight your content, but screen readers also use the information to allow you to skip paragraphs without leaving the flow of the document.
<div> tags, on the other hand, just say "here's some content, I don't know what it is" - it could be an image, a boxout, you name it. As said above, if all iWeb is doing is using <div>s, then the HTML is essentially worthless.
This might not be an issue in a photo gallery, but for something like a blog it's increasingly essential.
It took me a long time to get this "semantic" stuff, but once you do, it's difficult to put up with apps that trounce all over it. Anyway, enough ranting! It sounds like iWeb has enough solid grounding to allow it to become more semantic in 2.0, which can only be good :)