Re: Inline link icons [usage in MediaWiki]

Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
...
> Ideally I'd do both: have an icon (placed via CSS, not inline IMG
> element...just create classes for "word", "pdf" etc and assign those to
> the A elements) that makes it visually obvious what type of file you're
> referring to, 
...

I have only come across this technique of late, working with
MediaWiki[1] (the same software that drives Wikipedia[2]).  The
technique is used to indicate external links via a CSS class (as per
Patrick's suggestion), but providing the link href as text in
non-graphical user agents.

MediaWiki also uses the technique in the context of "site logo links
back to main page", which I particularly like.  Rather than starting the
page with a link with an inline image as seems to be the current
fashion, the link is actually at the end of the page, styled to appear
top-left and with the logo image appearing courtesy of CSS.  This
redundant link does not appear on my version of Lynx - you just get the
'Main Page' link under the navigation heading.

As I am using MediaWiki for content management for my SciSalvage[3]
project, I am slowly going through looking for accessibility issues; if
anyone has any experience of MediaWiki in an accessibility context, I'd
be interested in hearing any comments.

Cheers

M

References:
1 - <http://www.mediawiki.org>
2 - <http://www.wikipedia.org>
3 - <http://www.scisalvage.org>

-- 
Matthew Smith
Kadina Business Consultancy, South Australia
Work: <http://www.kbc.net.au> Personal: <http://www.mss.cx>

Received on Wednesday, 20 July 2005 22:52:25 UTC