Highlight Words

Scripsit Sherm Pendley:

IMHO, <span class="keyword"> has a more graceful fallback. In the
absence of stylesheet support, I think it would be preferable to omit
the highlighting entirely, rather than highlight keywords in a way
that may cause the end user some confusion.

That's illogical. If the keywords are worth highlighting, why would it be
better fallback to have them rendered in the same manner as some other
words, emphasized for other reasons, than to have them not highlighted at
all?

Users are anyway faced with the fact that italics and bolding have different
meanings on different pages and even within a page. They simply make things
"stand out", expressing emphasis of different kinds, and not always emphasis
at all.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> writes:

Scripsit Sherm Pendley:

IMHO, <span class="keyword"> has a more graceful fallback. In the
absence of stylesheet support, I think it would be preferable to omit
the highlighting entirely, rather than highlight keywords in a way
that may cause the end user some confusion.

That's illogical.

No, it's a subjective opinion, hence the phrase "I think". Logic has
nothing to do with it, it's a matter of personal preference.

My opinion is that a search engine highlighting found keywords is act-
ing as part of the presentational layer. The highlighting is part of
the display, not part of the document itself. Thus, I feel it should
not be done unless it can be done in a way that distinguishes that
difference.

YMMV, of course.

sherm--

--
Web Hosting by West Virginians, for West Virginians: http://wv-www.net
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net