Re: Breadcrumbs

Phil,

I agree that we should have better markup to indicate the
purpose of what I call "collections of links".  Bread crumbs
is one important case of a collection of links.  

I think there should be an easy way in markup to say here is a
collection of links and this is there purpose and/or how the
links are related to each other.  

User agents could provide functions to allow people to access
these collections of links by orienting users to the number of
collections, there purpose and providing direct navigation to
the collections.  

This could be used to provide more functionality to the
section 508 requirement to skip navigation links, by providing
a mecahnism in the browser to move to navigation links.

Right now the best way to do this in HTML 4 is with the MAP
element and title attribute.  The MAP element says this is a
collection of links and the title attribute provides
information about the purpose of the collection on the web page.

Jon



---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 17:36:12 -0500
>From: Phill Jenkins <pjenkins@us.ibm.com>  
>Subject: Re: Breadcrumbs  
>To: Jon Gunderson <jongund@uiuc.edu>
>Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
>
>   >Phill,
>   >CSS can be used to restyle <LI> elements to create
>   a number
>   >of graphic effects in current browsers.
>   >Jon
>
>   Jon, do you disagree with my earlier post?  I think
>   just adding the title attribute label is not enough.
>
>   If someone codes [bread crumb links] as a list and
>   uses CSS to add "greater than looking" image
>   characters before each link - then I believe that is
>   NOT accessible because if I turn off CSS I loose the
>   hint from the "greater than looking images" that
>   separate the links.  Those images/characters are the
>   hint that lets both the sighted and screen reader
>   users know they have encountered a bread crumb list
>   of links.  CSS should not be used to add semantical
>   information through styling.  Some may argue that
>   styling a list to make it look like a bread crumb
>   list is OK because it's a list after all isn't it?
>    My response has already been that it is not "just"
>   a list of links.  Bread crumbs are a special list of
>   links that convey additional hierarchal meaning that
>   is not available from the current set of <ul>, <ol>,
>   <dl> XHTML 1.1 list tags - hence the invention of
>   the current use of the "greater than" characters and
>   the horizontal formatting on a single line.  
>   Regards,
>   Phill


Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
MC-574
College of Applied Life Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street, Champaign, IL  61820

Voice: (217) 244-5870
Fax: (217) 333-0248

E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu

WWW: http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/
WWW: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund

Received on Wednesday, 25 August 2004 14:07:27 UTC