Internal Structure, and Semantics

[StevenBlack]

• Category: information architecture
• Sub-Category: Future discoverability, digests, and SEO
• The Problem: Currently the site does not use HTML semantics as well as it could. This is easy to fix within Jekyll templates.

Discussion: For full-value in the future, it would be helpful if the site used more than one level of heading tags to distinguish semantic structure . Currently h2 headings are used to delineate days, and that's it.

It will help search (and therefore discoverability) if search bots are able to better infer and structure site contents, and header nesting is one way to convey meaningful semantics.

Proposal: Daily sub-segments should be built with h3 tags, and things like Updates should use h4 tags. Consider using HTML 5 aside elements to structure the sidebar-like sections.

The following is captured using Chris Pedrick's Web Developer Toolbar Extension (under Information ~ View Document Outline). This is the current structure of the site:

[mkiser]

I think a few things have changed since this was logged. But, it's still largely correct.

The site title uses an h3 and the index page uses h2's for listing all the posts.

On a post page, the title uses an h1, though the text inside it isn't very helpful (e.g. Day 175)

Suggestions on improvements?

[mkiser]

I'd like to revisit this. Anybody able to do a new audit of the current structure?

[StevenBlack]

@mkiser here's the semantic view of the homepage today (June 14, 2018).

---

Looking within the pagination structure, picking a prime number at random (23) here's page 23.

---

Within that page 23 is Day 480. Here are the day-specific structural semantics.

[StevenBlack]

@mkiser I'd be happier if the tool I'm using could distinguish between <header>...</header>, <main>...</main> and <footer>...</footer>

[StevenBlack]

@mkiser here's Day 480's HTML formatted by the first online HTML formatter returned by a Google search. Viewing the HTML, properly formatted, is often interesting.

https://gist.github.com/StevenBlack/2453a0becac6716f08cdc963bdb62b6e

[mkiser]

Thanks! Digging into this shortly – got sidelined on some things.

[joecoc1916]

I will do work on this. I would apprciate help with my first to WTFHT. Thanks in advance ! joseph