Re: 4.13.1 Bread crumb navigation - use of right angle brackets

2013-09-17 12:13, Steve Faulkner wrote:
> I have updated the advice on marking up breadcrumb navigation:
> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/common-idioms.html#rel-up

The use of <ol> markup for anything that might be seen as an ordered 
list deviates from common practice for no good reason. It implies a 
default rendering that is practically never the desired one. So why take 
the trouble of using specific markup when its real effects are 
definitely not what you want.

Even if you think that <ol> is a possibility here, would it really be 
something to be recommended in favor of other alternatives?

>
> On 26 January 2013 17:00, Steve Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com 
> <mailto:faulkner.steve@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Section 4.13.1 Bread crumb navigation (under Common idioms without
>     dedicated elements [1])
>
>      encourages the use of the right angle bracket to indicate a
>     breadcrumb navigation trail:
>

It is GREATER THAN sign, and I agree that it is not adequate. But it has 
become common enough to become tolerable practice. A better character is 
a real arrow, “→”.

>
>     The use of > in this context does not appear to be a good practice to
>     promote as the angle bracket is a symbol that depending on user agent
>     (AT in this case) is typically announced as "greater" or not announced
>     in this context. Either way it is not clearly convyed that its a
>     breadcrumb trail.
>
Using <ol> would not express the idea of breadcrumb trail either. It 
suggests a numbered list of items, typically used when there is a reason 
to use explicit numbering.

“Bread crumb trail” is a concept specific to web pages and similar 
digital presentations, so there is no traditional way to present it, 
visually or in speech. Digital media creates its own traditions, in 
time. Even the “>” notation is not as odd as it may sound. People get 
used to things that they see or hear often. Visually, too, the use of 
“>” is a matter of convention: it is a mathematical comparison operator 
gone wild, and as such “Main > Products” is illogical visually, too: it 
does not say that Main is greater than Products.

If there is something to be fixed in 4.13.2 in HTML5 CR, it’s the use of 
<p> instead of <div>. It is pseudosemantic, since this is not about 
paragraphs in any normal sense – except as blocks of text. And <div> is 
a pure block element, which has no default margins, so it is more 
adequate here. Alternatively, a <ul> element with two <li> elements, 
each containing one bread crumb, could be used.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Tuesday, 17 September 2013 12:30:01 UTC