Re: Skip Navigation was RE: Access key questions

Links through a document that are just about jumping blocks of content 
are simple work that you can ask designers to do (although you then 
have to explain how they can make them zero-size and invisible, and 
then explain to them that keyboard users aren't all blind, ...)

They don't provide structure in the common sense of something that is 
machine recognisable and easy to re-present in an alternate format. 
They provide an extra set of navigation that increases the overall 
complexity of the page in an attempt to alleviate the lack of 
structure. Given that a fair bit of work went into making sure HTML 
could support machine-readable semantic structure it is a shame that 
the currently most popular browser doesn't provide much in the way of 
useful support.

Designers can very easily and quickly learn to provide structure - 
better ones already do. Asking them to instead provide extra navigation 
complexity in order to cope with backwards-compatibility problems 
(dealing with things that have been available for most of the life of 
the Web) seems like an unfortunate position to be in.

cheers

Chaals

On 29 Mar 2004, at 23:24, David Poehlman wrote:

> Andrew, your final statement is quite true and even to the extent that 
> they
> are not willing to style appropriately so even if you have the best of 
> user
> agents, authors still need to do some work which they are reticent to 
> do.
> Links that provide for movement through a hypertext document are 
> backward
> compatible and a clean simple way to provide structure in documents on 
> the
> web.
>
--
Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar
charles@sidar.org                                http://www.sidar.org

Received on Tuesday, 30 March 2004 02:37:30 UTC