Proper weblog entry markup?
Proper weblog entry markup?: “
I’ve been actively blogging for years now, and I’m still amazed at how disorganized the world of weblog markup is. Since the majority of tools for blog writing are still bare HTML, you get to see all the varieties of HTML use/abuse that people use/invent.
Hopefully as WYSIWYG weblog tools enter the market, those tools will pursue best practices when it comes to formatting weblog content.
But the question remains, what are the best practices for formatting weblog content? Certainly, we need to separate content from presentation, which is not even obvious to all bloggers today, let alone to people who don’t know any HTML. The tools really need to help them do this automatically and invisibly.
Here are some of my specific issues:
- What is the proper use of <p> paragraph tags? I see many weblog posts that don’t use them, and I even see some weblog posts that use <p> as a <br/>
- What is the proper use of list tags? Please use the <ol></ol> tags for ordered lists, and the <ul></ul> tags for unordered lists. In general, you shouldn’t be entering numbers manually in your lists, although if someone quotes only a few items, they should preserve the original numbers for better reference. Related to this, should lists be inside of paragraphs or standalone?
- What is the proper use of <br/> line break tags? If we’re really trying to separate content from presentation, then indicating breaks, especially using two <br/> tags in a row, seems wrong wrong wrong.
- What is the proper way to quote another weblog entry? This is probably my biggest question, since this is the core function of many webloggers. I personally wrap a quote in <blockquote></blockquote> tags, but should I be using <cite></cite> as well as or instead of?
I’m sure the answers are out there, in some spec or on some CSS-zen like site, but my intent with this post is to raise the issue in the blogosphere, and get vendors for WYSIWYG weblog editing products like ecto, BlogJet, and perhaps MarsEdit, coming to some consensus.
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(Via musings.)
Getting humans to write perfect computer markup will probably be about as successful as getting them to write perfect English. See? I’m assuming you’re an english speaking person. Look at the development of Safari… each release we saw them say “wow, people really have bad HTML writing skills, oh well, now we know why the other browsers are so screwy” … you have to accept all kinds of weird shit that people do and interpret it the best you can. <br><br> 
