- From: Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
- Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 17:50:23 -0700
- To: Nick Kew <nick@webthing.com>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
On Friday, June 13, 2003, at 04:35 PM, Nick Kew wrote: > On Fri, 13 Jun 2003, Kynn Bartlett wrote: >> 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. > > On the contrary, HTML provides distinct <HEAD> and <BODY> elements, > designating the former to contain metadata and the latter the > document to be presented directly by a browser to human readers. Those aren't distinct content sections, though. They're not sub-parts of content -- they just divide content from metacontent. This is a good thing, but this is clearly not all that is sufficient. > HTML also provides a <LINK> element, which is ideally suited to > navigation. The problem arises because certain popular browsers > fail to support the LINK element. Actually it's not well-suited for navigation. You can't construct, for example, a hierarchical navigation bar via <link>. You couldn't replicate the W3C homepage via the <link> element alone, of course. If I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, please correct me. > It would equally well be solved if the ideas in HTML 2.0 (and later > versions) were adequately supported by browsers. No, it's not well-solved. Which HTML 2.0 ideas, anyway? <link>? > This presupposes authors taking any notice of the XHTML structure, > which again brings it back to the same situation as with current HTML. No, because current HTML doesn't allow, for example, a distinction between which section of a page are navigation links. You can't "skip navigation" or "skip to content" automatically because there's no way to designate these in HTML, structurally. (<link> is not structural; it's metadata about structure, which is different.) >> 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"). > I agree that "skip navigation" is a particularly nasty hack, but it's > not the fault of HTML. Sure it is. The reason that "skip navigation" is necessary is that HTML does _not_ adequately describe Web content as it is used on the Web, nor does it really describe Web content which is not structurally identical to a physics term paper. If we don't have the tools in HTML to adequately describe the basic distinctions between types of Web content -- which is "primary content" and which is navigation -- then something's wrong with HTML, and needs to be fixed. The proposals in XHTML 2.0 address this in the same way that the longdesc attribute in HTML 4.0 solved the problem which had, before that, been addressed only by the D-link hack. Which, like visible "skip navigation" links, introduces vague and ultimately less-than-useful markup atthe expense of the visual design and the integrity of the content model. <link> solves some problems, but using it to skip groups of navigation links just means it's a well-applied band-aid rather than a cure. It's metadata attempting to fill a hole in the structural model, when really the structural model needs semantic enhancement itself. --Kynn -- 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 20:45:11 UTC