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What about using <h> tags as a substitute for <font> tags altogether - do you see any problems? I mean something like this:
<h1> Main title </h1>
<h2> Another title </h2>
<h3> Sub titles </h3>
<h4>
<br><br>Text block
<br><br>Text block 2
<br><br>Text block 3
<br><br>More text blcks...
</h4>
</body>
</html>
Do you see any problems with this? Would Google have any problems with text pages like this = all text between <h4> tags with no other font declarations anywhere?
Katarina
Secondly, <font> tags have been deprecated for about a 1000 years or so, so that's pretty useless too.
<h1>Title of page</h1>
<h2>If you need a subtitle</h2>
<p class="your_p_styles">Your nicely styled paragraphs here.</p>
<h3>New subtitle if you need it</h3>
<p>more text.... you see the point?</p>
Abuse of that nature may not trip a spam filter but it will invite competitors to grass you up for it and will be a pain in the arse for any poor sod that visits such a site...
Nick
<h2>Header with kw</h2>
<p>content with kw</p>
<h4>Header with kw</h4>
<p>content with kw</p>
/Ove
>Secondly, <font> tags have been deprecated for about a 1000 years or so.
Yes, Nick_W, I know that among professionals <font> tags have been deprecated but non-professionals still use them and probably will continue to do so for a long time to come.
Using <h4> tags that way may be stupid, but is it abuse? I know that for instance <h1> tags are valued but I thought that it was just because of a larger font. But <h4> is not that large, does it still give benefits over other text of the same size? If it does, yes then I can see that it is abuse, otherwise just stupid perhaps. The site in question is not optimized in any way so I don't think it was after higher rankings.
And thank you, Ove, for your good suggestion. I am quite unfamiliar with <h> tags still but seeing <h4> tags used that way, made me curious. So far I have almost no <h> tags on my site.
Katarina
Even some of us non pros have switched to CSS. It took me awhile because I thought the learning curve would be overwhelming. But, it wasn't really that bad and there are some great threads here on WebmasterWorld to help. Now, updating my site is soooooo much quicker and easier.
I urge you to take the plunge and avoid replicating <h> tags all over your pages. If it isn't considered spam today, it might be tomorrow - just when you don't have time to go fix all those pages!
Yes, Nick_W, I know that among professionals <font> tags have been deprecated but non-professionals still use them and probably will continue to do so for a long time to come
It's not really a question of pro or not. It's a question of standards. THe font tag is no longer part of the html specification and therfore is a bsd idea to include in your markup.
I know that for instance <h1> tags are valued but I thought that it was just because of a larger font
No. It's valued because it's a level one heading. You can happily display h1's at normal browser defualt text sixe and give it backgrounds, bordes, letter-spacing etc.
The point is that it makes sense in the documents flow, Would it make sense to a text reader?
Nick
I will use CSS on my pages, but whenever I make any changes to CSS I have to run through about a dozen browsers worth of testing to make sure I haven't broken any.
I am able to use FONT without breaking any browser, so if FONT will do the job, I will always choose it.
By the way, I guess I'm actually supporting your contention, I am not a pro. I'm an assembly language programmer who has been counting clock cycles and bits for the last 25 years. Then again, I prefer the more interesting amateur side of the web myself, the net was a lot more fun before the corporations discovered it.
Dave
Yes, nancyb, some non pros have switched to CSS. And I believe that it may make updating the site much easier. But: I have also heard horror stories from many non pros about all the errors they made and what a mess it was when they tried to switch to CSS... Some of them changed quickly back to FONTS. I myself make mistakes even without CSS - when I read a thread yesterday about the worst mistakes people have made, I just couldn't help recognizing myself = I had made the most of them.
And, Dave, I loved your comment, that the web has decided that the W3C was wrong in removing FONT in favor of CSS. Yes, really, why can't they coexist?
Dave also said that he tested changes to CSS using several browsers. Not all of us non pros can do that. I am glad that Google still indexes amateur sites quite well. Hopefully it will continue doing just that. There are a lot of us still around. Many of us are not very technically minded and we'd like to keep it simple and just concentrate our efforts on creating content instead of messing around with new techniques when we can see nothing wrong with old ones. And have hundreds or thousands of pages created using old standards. But perhaps one of these days ...
Katarina
I personally think it was stupid to remove it in favor of the bloat that is CSS.
You're obviously not getting the point of CSS Dave. Bloat? I don't think so... One line in your stylesheet as opposed to countless lines on every page of your site?
CSS is very easy and there are some great newbie threads in the browsers section, check it out, I'm sure you'll find it worthwhile.
As for errors. With fonts? No, not with fonts. With Positioning yes, it takes some time to master the principles of cross browser CSS but with just declaring a font, what could be simpler, or more reliable?
p {
font-family: arial, verdana, sans-serif;
]
That will work on every browser including NN4.
If you guys want to use <font> tags, go ahead, it's a big web and there's room for lots of styles and attitudes. But, you're missing a golded opportunity to write clean, simple code that's cross-browser friendly.
CSS is not scary, it's not 'new technology' it's the way web pages are supposed to be written.
Nick
I never said I was a newbie, I said I was not a pro. I would actually be very surprised if there was anyone on this list who used HTML before I first played with it in late 93.
Scared of CSS? I don't think so. I know CSS very well, and I will use it when appropriate, especially when it is the ONLY way to do things. But with FONT it is not the only way to change the font.
And Font will generally take less bytes than <span style="...">, therefore in the case of one off events, CSS is more expensive. In other words, in this case it is bloat.
Font is also more intuitive. I could show it to my mom and she would be able to guess what it does. If I showed her a SPAN CLASS= she would be lost.
Also having a LINK to a CSS is expensive in a way that most people do not realize. That is an extra GET. Do you have any users across the globe that rarely get better than a 9600 connection? I do, and they love the fact that my site looks good AND loads fast.
Remember, I am an assembly language programmer. We like speed and we count bytes.
My site doesn't actually have any .html files, they are all php perl and python. In any of these cases, it is just as easy to change things in one place, and it doesn't cost me an extra GET.
If you want to use CSS, that it fine. But do not talk down to those who may have even made a conscious, informed decision to use what they consider to be a better option, or those newbies who find it easier to use.
As this is getting quite off topic for google I will shut up now and let you have the last word on this if you want.
What you do, is put: .textstyle {...} in your external style sheet, and then when you want to style a chunk of text that way, you put <p class="textstyle"></p> in your html instead of <p><font size="3" color="red" etc., etc.></font></p>.
Then you call the style sheet in the <head> of your document like so:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
Visitors only have to download the external stylesheet once to control the text and layout of your entire site, instead of having to load a bloated font tag for every single change in your text appearance on every single page.
CSS takes up a fraction of the space using font tags for an entire site does. If you actually know how to use it properly. If not, no problem... keep using font tags. But the least you could do is refrain from spreading misinformation about proper CSS usage.
Talking down? No, I'm not interested in how long you've been working with computers, the newbie reference is just used to describe those in this thread that aren't familiar with CSS. Not you specifically ;)
Nick
[edited by: Nick_W at 6:33 pm (utc) on Sep. 11, 2002]
That extra GET seems like a good investment to me, because the external CSS file only needs to be loaded once per visitor, and for each subsequent page they visit the stylesheet is already in their cache, available instantly. Overall, the bandwidth savings from using CSS are substantial.
Nick, the finger-waggling and tongue-sticking is totally unnecessary
Hey, give me some credit here, I wrote that as you were writing your post.
The meaning was a little more silly and fun before I noticed your post.
Nick
And they´d be even more thankful, if the pages were served by a webserver written in assembly language ;) ;) ;)
sorry Sasquatch, sorry mivox
Nick, I had a good laugh however inappropriate it might have been. (I just saw that it´s gone. Being pc is really boring sometimes.)
Why "sorry mivox"? I agree with you totally. :)
No, to answer your question, and I'd not risk the experiment on my site ;)
Nick
No, never ever considered doing so. I have that gut feeling that the <p> tag is a terrible thing to miss. I try to keep a proper balance between <h> and <p>.
There are some people who still say that search engine spiders like to munch on HTML 3.2, and some of us will continue to use nested tables and font tags on certain sites - like me, for small budget product sites with shopping cart code, done up quick and dirty in Dreamweaver - they look good and the search engine spiders like them just fine.
What about using <h> tags as a substitute for <font> tags altogether - do you see any problems? I mean something like this:
Since this thread was started in the Google forum (not the HTML forum) let's go back to the original question.
Regardless of whether it gets by without penalty, there's a problem with large blocks of text in <h> tags because they're for a purpose and emphasis. They're supposed to demark a section and relate to the main idea in the section, which is most likely why they're assigned a higher value than regular text.
<h1>Womens Holiday Widgets</h1> is very precise and tells Googlebot exactly what the page or section is about because of the emphasis. Putting the whole paragraph in the <h1> is not only confusing, it completely dilutes the value it would have had with just the phrase used as the tag is intended.
So there's a problem with shooting yourself in the foot by losing the advantage of having the main keyword phrase by itself.
Returning us to the topic of this thread, I can't see why Google or any other search engine would penalise you for putting all your text in <H4> or even <H1> tags. Surely the only effect <EM>, <B>, <H>, etc. tags have is to change the relative weighting of text within the page.
Yes, of course, putting whole paragraphs in <h1> tag would be confusing, why would you want to emphasize everything. But putting a paragraph in <h4> tags would not give that much emphasis. And thus I wonder, as you said, Danny, why would Google penalize the site for using <h4> tags that way. Anyway, I think that the idea was not to emphasize anything, it was just to save space. <h4></h4> takes less space than for instance <b></font size="3"></font></b>.
If there are no images and no scripting and all you need is just one <h> tag for title and one font <tag> for text, a style sheet really may feel like bloat.
Katarina
when you use font, you need to specify things right? If you don't, you wouldn't use this tag now would you?
e.g.:
<font color="", size="", align="",etc.></font>
<div class="body1"></div>
+ css allowows for far more options.
Greetz,
Th@Duke
[edited by: heini at 12:43 pm (utc) on Sep. 13, 2002]
[edit reason] see sticky mail [/edit]
<hx> tags denote headers...using a visual kludge to make them appear in some circumstances to be otherwise isn't a great idea
A very good point - thank you! I did not know that.
Katarina
A minor change, adding the font-weight into the head section for selected areas of the page means using <p> without having to repeat those font tags. Sometimes it's necessary to have text heavier in weight because of the background graphics being used.
Print or textured backgrounds are very appropriate for some sites, and they do require a darker font weight. But staying close to standards, irregardless of validation issues, and the original intentions of the tags, is pretty well compatible with what's good for search engines without being confusing or deceptive.
Now after reading several threads about CSS I understand even better why some amateur webmasters don't want to touch it. In some cases it seems to create more problems than it solves, you have to worry about whether Google accepts your solution or whether this or that browser knows what to do. I myself have created my site using a small (Finnish) freeware program that apparently has never heard about such finesses as CSS or even DIV, neither had I before joining Webmasterworld this summer.
Thus being a bit overwhelmed now I'll just resort back to my lurker status and just do some more studying and thinking before I make any more "stupid" questions and get once more my head bitten off because of that.
Thank you all for your time.
Katarina
