Re: Navigation bars with dynamic content

"SHARPE, Ian":
> Not sure about screen read accessible but certainly not IE with ignore
> colors accessiblity checkbox checked. Menus drop and overlap other text
> making them unreadable.

That is a User Agent problem, indeed with that setting and stylesheets
enabled, all CSS-P fails, it's nothing to do with javascript, it's CSS-P
(you probably think it's related to javascript, as this is one of the few
areas where CSS-P is used.)  There are two UA solutions to the problems
"ignore colours" sets CSS-P background to the same as the background the
user wants unless the background is set to transparent.  Or the UA
disables CSS-P when that setting is set.  There is also a user solution,
not to use the ignore colours option, but to use a custom stylesheet
which will not have the same problem, and provide the same functionality.

> Lynx ignores them also.

As do all script unaware browsers, menus should be accessible without
scripting, that's already established.

> My opinion is that
> javascript menus are bad practice and their use should be avoided at
all
> costs. What's wrong with the heading link navigating to a separate page
> contain the dropped links together with additional helpful information
eh?
> Another round trip? Not good enough I'm affraid!!

It may be accessible, but it is certainly not very usable, round trips
are very expensive, lots of visible links are intimidating, a 10 second
roundtrip to get to the "dropped links" is completely unacceptable, as is
the 200% increase in bandwidth IMO.  You may be happy with that level of
usability, but most people are not.

> A link's a link, not
> something which causes other links to appear when you move a pointer
over
> it!!

A link is an Hypertext context, how your user agent chooses to deal with
that concept is something that is between you and your user agent, if
your user agent chooses to provide interfaces to make that do other
things in response to author suggestions, it is not the authors fault for
using those suggestions - you do have control over the rendering of the
page. Script, like CSS, like colours, are just suggestions - feel free to
ignore them.

In any case the two are not mutually exclusive - e.g
http://www.rcslt.org/

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I've chosen to ignore all this as it is inappropriate garbage, please let
me know if I should actually take notice, and perform the actions
specified?

Jim.

Received on Wednesday, 30 January 2002 09:15:26 UTC