[WEB4LIB] Re: another tangent to Re: Inline forms in CSS

[Vicki Falkland]

thanks for all the responses to this.
i really thought Atomz was the way to go until i saw that comment about the
<noindex> thing. obviously i cannot use it now. i'll be taking a look at
swish-e instead.
when my boss asks me "why the change?" i'll tell her "cos the WEB4LIBbers
told me its a bad bad thing" :)

many thanks,
Vicki



At 06:54 AM 28/02/02 -0800, you wrote:
>At 05:20 PM 2/27/2002, Vicki Falkland wrote:
>> >
>> >[Second things second: Who invented <NOINDEX>...</NOINDEX>
>> >elements?  Proprietary/made-up stuff like that gets more and more
likely to
>> >screw things up as browsers start expecting you to abide by your doctype
>> >declaration.]
>> >
>>
>>I am in the process of implementing a search feature on our site using
>>Atomz (www.atomz.com)
>>While testing, I noticed that if I searched on a word which happened to be
>>used in various bits of navigation text, the search results listed every
>>page in the site and the descriptive text was simply a rehash of the
>>navigation text.
>>Their help files suggest using <noindex></noindex> for any portions of text
>>I may wish to exclude from being indexed (like navigation!) to correct this
>>problem.
>
>HTML is not just an arbitrary bunch of tags, to which vendors can add their 
>own creations willy-nilly.  It is a standard derived by a consensus of the 
>W3C membership.  Anyone writing software that does something with HTML can 
>look at the standard; they won't look at the Atomz help documents.
>
>By adding a bogus NOINDEX element, you break any program that looks for 
>valid markup.  That includes, obviously, validators, which will never pass 
>your pages--so you may not be able to use them to see what else is wrong 
>with them.
>
>It also increases the risk that newer browsers, some of which take your 
>doctype declaration seriously, will choke to some extent on seeing this 
>unknown element.  Will that cause problems with HTML and/or CSS 
>rendering?  Answer: you can't know for sure, so stick to the spec.
>
>And the most likely problem: an HTML editor, upon opening your page, may 
>discard the bogus elements it finds, perhaps without warning you, so that 
>when you save it again there will be changes you're not aware of.
>
>It's a pity the Atomz didn't take the obvious step of delimiting 
>non-indexed parts of the document with comments.  It seems obvious to me 
>that you could look for "<!-- atomz indexing off -->...<!-- atomz indexing 
>on -->" without affecting the validity of the document.  If they have 
>responsive developers, you might suggest something like that.
>
>
>If you were running a search engine on your own server that looked at the 
>source HTML files rather than getting them through your server, you could 
>use server-side includes for the navigation bars.  Then they wouldn't even 
>be in the files that get indexed.
>
>
>Thomas Dowling
>OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
>tdowling at ohiolink.edu
>
>
>