martin f krafft wrote:

> If you look at e.g. http://www.google.com/search?as_q=madduck%20blog,
>  you'll see that Google summarises the first hit with "This entire 
> site is under construction and thoroughly incomplete! (Mar 2008)" 
> which is at the top of the page.

The paragraph saying that "This entire site is under construction and
thoroughly incomplete! (Mar 2008)", isn't part of what you call header.
If you really think that paragraph should be in the page, then it should
most definitely be the first a visitor sees - regardless of whether they
enter through google or a text browser or a CSS enabled browser.

It's informative when read in sequence, but seems to be less so if the
order is changed significantly. Thus, moving bits around in _that_
page's source and then move them back with CSS, js or whatever, doesn't
really make much sense.

If, OTOH, you had a whole "screen-load" of links or other stuff in
between what _appears to be_ the article-headline - <span id="title"> -
and the article itself, then the relevant bits should probably be
arranged a bit different. Whether or not such a rearrangement should
appear to differ in order between UAs, is a completely different matter.

> Ideally, the title and first sentence should show up there, right?

The title-element, yes, but what bits google extracts from a document
can not be controlled by applying a certain source-order.
Example:
<http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=gunlaug&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8>
...where, logical or not, google present bits that are extracted from
both ends of the content-area.
Our home-page on top of that search is source-ordered the way I want it,
and so are all pages on our site. Google extracts what that company have
decided is most suitable to present for a specific search.

What you'll see for our home-page's English-language counterpart with
identical source-order, in a text browser like Lynx...
<http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gunlaug.no%2Fmain-en.html>
...clearly shows the intended order, but with link-relations extracted
from the page-head on top. In my other browsers those link-relations are
somewhere else, or not shown at all.

This just to show that what ends up where, be it in google or anywhere
else, depends on more than source-order and is to a large degree out of
the designer/author's control.


I think I would rather focus on marking up with the most appropriate
elements - like a h1 instead of a span for what appears to be the main
headline, than manipulate source-order, in the case you have presented.

regards
        Georg
-- 
http://www.gunlaug.no
______________________________________________________________________
css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d
List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/
List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html
Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/

Reply via email to