Re: Skip Navigation was RE: Access key questions

ah,  True, but think of the search engine and indexing value that this 
affords.  One thing we need is a push to get off the dtp/web thing on the 
web and to work with the much richer concepts available to the web than in 
dtp.  I say this because it seems that the biggest problems we face is 
attempting to do dpt on the web and provide an interface that makes it 
available to the broadest possible audience.

To alleviate the multiple pairs approach and still provide structure, 
perhaps there could be a navigation page, a main page etc.  Then, on the 
navigation page, one could go directly to the page they want and then link 
back to the main or table of contents as desired.

Jon Gunderson's add in for ie can help with some of the defficiencies of ie, 
but a good deal of thought needs to be put into structure that is simply 
navigable and robustly compatible.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Charles McCathieNevile" <charles@sidar.org>
To: "David Poehlman" <poehlman1@comcast.net>
Cc: "Andrew Kirkpatrick" <andrew_kirkpatrick@wgbh.org>; 
<sdale@stevendale.com>; <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2004 2:24 AM
Subject: 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 08:37:55 UTC