By now you are probably thoroughly confused by this whole Content Enhanced business. Well let me explain. I am by no means the first to propose this concept. In fact I nicked it from someone else, I just don't remember who. Perhapse I just found it down the back of the sofa.
Anyway the basic tenets of Content Enhanced web page design are:
When I started writing my web pages I made a concerted effort to avoid the
standard personal web page which tends to fall into one of two camps. Either
Hello, my name is X, I am studying Y at Z university. Here are some
cool links
or Hello, my name is X and I've been given Y Megs
of web space by Z, my ISP. Here are some cool links.
To this end have made sure that I add my own original work to the site when some occurs to me. It's not always useful but even if it gives someone a bit of amusement then I recon it time well spent. Of course this doesn't mean I don't have link lists, just that there is also some content which is to be found nowehere else on the Web.
I am a strong believer that HTML was designed to mark up the meaning of a piece of text rather than to control how it looks. This of course brings me into direct confrontation with the majority of people designing web pages who seem to believe that presentation is everything.
I have written the HTML in these pages to be equally viewable on every browser from Lynx to Mozilla. I do not make use of proprietry tags or extensions. I also avoid Javascript as no one seems able to agree on exactly what that is.
On the other hand I don't begrudge web authors the right to recomend how they would like their pages to be viewed. To this end I hartely endorse style sheets and have used them throughout. Since my browser does not support them they are very simple and un-tested but I have made the effort.
I have made a decleration of conformity stating that it is my aim that all these pages should be strictly valid.
When you get right down to it what I am advocating is solid content and substance over style. If you find yourself in agreement or disagreement with my views it would be nice to hear from you. Feel free to link to this page either way.
This point is not included in the list above as it is my personal interpretation of the Content Enhanced ideology and I don't feel it would be right to ask everyone else to accept it. Adopt it if you like.
All my pages are written in lovingly hand crafted HTML by a skilled craftsman who's skill have been passed down from generation to generation. Well actually not that skilled and those skills are passed around more than down but you see what I'm saying.
I have yet to see an automated HTML generator which generates good HTML. I feel that a WYSIWYG HTML editor is an oxymoron since the wole point about HTML is that what you see is not necesarily what the reader will get. Therefore when a word precessor or desktop publisher attempts to control the layout of a page it envariably makes a mess. This bloats the file causing it to take longer to download and can lead to pages which will look fine in one browser but will be completely unreadable in another.
Concider this as a recomendation. I recomend that anyone serious about HTML coding should learn how to do it at the text editor level. It's really not that hard and if you are not relying on the Microsoft HTML wizard or whatever you are likely to find it much easier to make a distinctive page.