- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 16:16:02 -0700
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Hi everyone. Skip Navigation links are there to compensate for a deficiency in HTML. Namely, there's no good way to designate "sections" of a page which can't be navigated through easily. The browser can't figure out which is which, and so needs help from the author. This is why, if you're serving HTML 4.01 (or XHTML 1.0), you need to provide that functionality which is otherwise not easily derived from the markup by the browser. In XHTML 2.0, this problem may be solved, at least if the ideas in the current version of the XHTML 2.0 draft are followed through. The <section> element [1] allows you to designate sections of the document as comprising a logical section. This section can be labeled by the <h> [2] element, a replacement for the <h1> through <h6> tags which is context-based, not explicitly specified as the existing tags. What's more, the proposed XHTML 2.0 draft introduces the new navigation list element, <nl> [3]. Navigation lists are similar to <ol> and <ul> lists, in that they consist of <li> list items, but they explicitly used for navigation structures. Navigation lists are labeled with the <label> [4] element. By making both content section structure and navigation functionality explicit in the markup, XHTML 2.0 does a great service for accessibility: An XHTML 2.0-aware browser is able to generate its own structured outline of the document, allow skipping to the next section, and allow automatic skipping of navigation lists. This is a great step forward in patching one of the glaring holes in the HTML language which has made it an obstacle to Web accessibility (requiring the use of nasty hacks like "skip navigation"). If you agree, you could write to the W3C's XHTML Working Group [5] and thank them, or maybe read over the whole draft [6] and provide feedback. --Kynn [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xhtml2-20030506/mod-block- text.html#sec_8.9. [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xhtml2-20030506/mod-block- text.html#sec_8.5. [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xhtml2-20030506/mod-list.html#sec_11.2. [4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xhtml2-20030506/mod-list.html#sec_11.5. [5] http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/ [6] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xhtml2-20030506/ -- Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com> http://kynn.com Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain http://idyllmtn.com Author, CSS in 24 Hours http://cssin24hours.com Inland Anti-Empire Blog http://blog.kynn.com/iae Shock & Awe Blog http://blog.kynn.com/shock
Received on Friday, 13 June 2003 19:12:05 UTC