RE: Invisible "Skip navigation" link

That's a good option, but not necessarily one the owner of the site I'm
auditing will like. (It has 28000 pages.)

The HTML spec says:

User agents may ignore leading and trailing white space in CDATA
attribute values (e.g., "   myval   " may be interpreted as "myval").
Authors should not declare attribute values with leading or trailing
white space.

By including leading and trailing spaces I don't see how anything will
break, except that if spaces are chopped off the accessibility effect is
lost. Even if well punctuated a screen reader may say this about 2
images:

"Link to home page.About Us."

The dodgy word may sound like "page DOT About". 

I'm afraid I'm still not sure what the safest solution is. Enclose all
CDATA in "[]"?




-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Charles McCathieNevile
Sent: 24 July 2002 02:14 PM
To: Steve Vosloo
Cc: 'WAI IG'
Subject: RE: Invisible "Skip navigation" link



Well, one approach is to use XHTML, where it is OK to have
leading/trailing whitespace that is expected to be significant.

Going against things specified as "should" should not  be done lightly.
You should ensure that if you do so, you are not breaking anything. That
seems to be the case here...

Cheers

Chaals

On Wed, 24 Jul 2002, Steve Vosloo wrote:

>
>It seems there are instances where guidelines clash with best 
>practices/workarounds, like the example here. You're damned if you do 
>and damned if you don't! This whole field is still working itself out 
>and there are bound to be these situations.
>
>I reckon you simply have to choose a solution and make it consistent 
>across your site. Given the facts I have so far, I'm happy to put 
>trailing spaces on everything.
>
>Steve
>
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On 
>Behalf Of Jukka Korpela
>Sent: 24 July 2002 09:19 AM
>To: 'WAI IG'
>Subject: RE: Invisible "Skip navigation" link
>
>
>
>Steve Vosloo wrote:
>
>> To cover all bases it seems a good idea to always put a space after a

>> text description, and usually after some sort of punctuation:
>>
>> <a href="#content" title="Skip Navigation. Access key = 2. "> <img 
>> src="hello.gif" alt="Hello world. "> <frame src="banner.html" 
>> title="Frame banner. ">
>
>In practice, I tend to agree, at least in situations where alt texts 
>would otherwise "run together".
>
>But we have a problem here. The HTML 4 specification says that user 
>agents may ignore leading and trailing spaces in attributes (e.g., 
>treat alt="foo " as equivalent to alt="foo") for "CDATA attributes" 
>(such as title, alt, and many others). This is specified in section 6.2

>"SGML basic types" (so you may easily miss it when using the 
>specification as a reference): 
>http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#h-6.2
>And it even says in this context: "Authors should not declare attribute
>values with leading or trailing white space." (Someone might interpret
>this "only" as a strong way of saying that authors should not _rely_ on
>such space being preserved.)
>
>XHTML is a different beast:
>"Whitespace in attribute values is processed according to [XML]."
>  http://www.w3.org/TR/html/#uaconf
>And this means strict (and fairly complicated) normalization rules:
>  http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#AVNormalize
>But those rules do not make stripping leading and trailing spaces 
>mandatory for CDATA attributes - though they _do_ require such 
>stripping for other attributes! (And they require compression of 
>multiple spaces, so that alt="foo  " is normalized to alt="foo ".)
>
>It's difficult to say whether XHTML is intended to _allow_ stripping of

>leading and trailing spaces in CDATA attributes (as HTML 4 does).
>
>Note that if such stripping is allowed, alt=" " can be treated as 
>identical to alt="", which would not be nice at all if e.g. the image 
>is a separator between adjacent words.
>
>

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61
409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI  fax: +33 4
92 38 78 22
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex,
France)

Received on Wednesday, 24 July 2002 08:41:50 UTC