Re: Skip links ARE a markup problem (was RE: Skip links should be a markup problem)

> >From what I can remember of those days of the web, semantics and
> structure were nowhere as popular or important the topics they are
> now.

Semantics and structure have always been key to the web.  There may be
more awareness of them amongst commercial and vanity users of IE as
as graphics display tool these days, but I'm not even convinced of that.
A lot of what the W3C has been doing with HTML is to try and fight off
the worst excesses of the market's trying to turn HTML into a pure page
description language.

> 
> But in light of the evolving state of "web theory" (for lack of a
> better phrase), link seems like the PERFECT instrument for

Link has essentially dropped out of the HTML series of specifications
because commercial web developers consider it of no value (no visual
effect).

> intradocument relationships as well, and in that light it'd be nice to
> see the W3C officially recognize that potential.

Although I haven't read the XHTML 2 draft recently referenced, it seems to
me that for XHTML 2, which is really a librarian's not an advertising
executive's language, has put a strong emphasis on link types, including
their use for qualifying inline material (although my own view is that
the right thing would have been for browsers to assemble navigation
bars from externally linked documents - although that will never happen now).

> new approaches to old web development problems (marking up nav links
> as unordered lists, 

In my view that one has always been obvious to anyone who believes 
HTML is about structure.  The reason it hasn't happened is that 
browsers are able to produce the wanted visual effect without it and
making use of it may constrain the layout options.

One other point is that rel and rev are valid on visible links (a elements)
as well as on link elements.

Received on Wednesday, 27 April 2005 06:47:47 UTC