top or bottom navigation links

I would like to suggest a (partial) solution to the top vs. bottom 
navigation links debate:

For a large site that has many links, often  the site 
has a table where the first (left) cell is a navigation "side-bar"
and the second (right) cell is the flow of text. in this case, 
when linking to other pages, link to a named anchor in the 
begining of the flow of text in the second cell. 

For the sighted it is the same. The named anchor is in 
the first line of the page. In a browser that linearizes tables 
you skip the links.

In addition add "redundent" links as a paragraph in the 
bottom, for the benefit of non-sighted who skipped the first 
cell and for all of those (sightted or not) who read the page 
through and scrolled down to the bottom.

This is a partial solution since speech machines that read 
line by line of a screen don't like tables like this in the 
first place. However if the web author insists on this 
table for layout, it seems a reasonable linking scheme, 
I think.

Regards,

Nir Dagan                            
Assistant Professor of Economics      
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona (Spain)

email: dagan@upf.es
Website: http://www.econ.upf.es/%7Edagan/

Received on Saturday, 18 July 1998 14:19:40 UTC