[Bug 7557] New: add "type" attribute to <nav> distinguish between primary and secondary navigation

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=7557

           Summary: add "type" attribute to <nav> distinguish between
                    primary and secondary navigation
           Product: HTML WG
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: PC
               URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/semantics.html#the-nav-
                    element
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: HTML5 spec proposals
        AssignedTo: dave.null@w3.org
        ReportedBy: mike@w3.org
         QAContact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: ian@hixie.ch, mike@w3.org, public-html@w3.org


It would be useful to have a "type" attribute on <nav> with the enumerated
values "primary" and "secondary".

Rationale and use case:

Many documents contain different classes of navigational content. In most
documents that provide such classes of navigational content, the main
difference is between primary navigation and secondary navigation.

The distinction between what constitutes primary navigation and what
constitutes secondary navigation is of course not universal, but one way to
describe the distinction would be: Primary navigation is the main set of
navigational links for a site -- the important stuff that consistently and
prominently appears in the same page on every page of a site -- and secondary
navigation is the less important stuff that appears less prominently and
perhaps less consistently and may not always be in the same place on every page
of site.

In the section defining <nav> in the current draft spec itself, one of the
examples (currently the second example there) shows a case of <nav> being used
to mark up both some primary navigation and some secondary navigation. So that
seems to help support the argument that it would be useful to have a standard
means to mark up the different between those two classes of navigation.

Also, as the note at the beginning of the section on <nav> mentions, UAs such
as screen readers [or, by the way, browsers on mobile handsets] can use the
<nav> element as a way to determine what content on the page to initially skip
and/or provide on only on request [in the same of browsers on mobile devices,
they might, for example, want to provide access to such navigation through a
soft-key menu on the device, instead of rendering it in the main text flow of
the page].

But for such UAs, it would be useful to have a means to distinguish primary
navigation from secondary navigation; for example, they might want to make the
main navigation more easily skippable or available through other means, but 
keep the secondary navigation within the main text flow.

So the use case here is basically to enable users to have a different user
experience for primary navigation and secondary navigation in cases where it
makes sense for them to -- and thus for page authors and UAs that want to allow
end users a different user experience of primary navigation and secondary
navigation, to provide a standard means for making the distinction between the
two.


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Received on Wednesday, 9 September 2009 18:35:53 UTC