Proposed Web site redesign (beta)

[mike at handuma.com]

Good question David. You could have dismissed my comments as puerile nit-picking
but you had enough respect to ask a good question. What do I mean by semantics?
Not what you thought it meant? Youíre probably referring to the Webster's definition,
I quote, "se-man-tic, a. [Gr. semantikos, significant meaning.] 1. of meaning,
especially meaning in language: as, syllable stress is a semantic factor." The
previous statement translated from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary into geek,
se-man-tic, a. [Gr. semantikos, significant meaning.] 1.  of meaning, especially
meaning in Web pages: as, make sure your tags have meaning.   I like Steven
and I appreciate his efforts to improve the club's Web site but I actually liked
Hal's informal design better. It was quaint, friendly and aesthetically pleasing.
I'm rather serious here, Steven's proposed site is unsemantic because it's laid
out with nested  tables instead of meaningful tags. A tag, like, <dive id="sidebar">
has meaning and appropriate styles, for example, #sidebar {float: right;} can
be applyed to it. Tables are great when they're used to display tabular data.
Then their tags really mean something. In a table of baseball statistics for
instance, the caption and heading tags are meaningful and can have styles applied
to them in appropriate fashion. Tables used for layout are "old school," remnants
of the browser wars of the last millennium. You can catch divitis and/or classitis
by including a tag like, <div class="thisorthat"> inside a table used for layout
in order to imbue it's data with meaning. XML tags are semantic. For instance,
in, " <lineitem><name></name><description ></description><price></price></lineitem>,"
the tags inside the root element have meaning, and styles can be applied to
them in a meaningful ways with xslt. If we continue this discussion very long
we'll redesign klug.org right here on the list. After all, Hal has kept the
site simple (keep Internet site simple [kIss]). I thank cymor for introducing
me to, Designing with Web Standards by Jeffery Zeldman and Web Standard Solutions
the Markup and Style Handbook by Dan Cederholm. Both of these books emphasize
the significance of tags. We need these books in the clubís library.



Handuma

P.S. Yes, Brian, I'd like some new features too. Emm, maybe streaming media,
and a database for the clubs library. 


http://www.handuma.com