Pros & cons of using HTML Tags

[Hillary Handwerger]

I may be working under some of the same assumptions, however here is what 
I have been told, and what I seem to have found by experience.

I beleve I have been told at some time that tags are important for those 
little worms and knowbots that search the sites-- however, its my 
understanding that the h1 and h2 tags are about as deep as they go.

Now, I have had a number of sites out there, and I have seen little to 
support that these worms are going deeper than h1, if even that far.  
However, I continue to use the title field and the h1 code to put in 
information for the worms to find.

The font sizes have the additional benefit of allowing me to format the 
look of my pages (www.apaa.org).  I don't have to deal with the extra 
spacing forced by using the h tags, and I can mix font sizes on a single 
line.  It also works on preformatted text and tables.



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Hillary Handwerger
hillaryh at sme.org
Society of Manufacturing Engineers-- CoNDUIT Project
313 271-1500 ext 597 
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On Tue, 6 Feb 1996, Mary-Ellen Mort wrote:

> I have seen allusions to this in other discussions but would like to 
> start a thread to tackle the topic head on:
> 
> Some website designers--in order to control the "look & feel" of their
> pages--use font sizes and other formatting instead of the standard HTML 
> heading tags (H1-H6)
> 
> But many of the "cool" sites--like c|net--use non-standard tags to control 
> white space and to give their site a "different" look.
> 
> Few libraries do this (am I wrong?)
> 
> My understanding is that using the standard tags aids the search engines 
> in indexing the site. Is this true?  If true, is the impact--of not being 
> properly indexed--so substantial that one would give up the "cool" look?
> 
> Also that using the standard tags will assure cross platform display in a 
> variety of browsers.
> 
> Do users prefer the "innovative" looking sites or the "standard" sites?
> Does anyone have surveys or experiences on this topic?
> 
> Mary-Ellen Mort
> memort at netcom.com
>