- From: Ian B. Jacobs <ij@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 08:38:58 -0500
- To: Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>
- CC: Dominique Hazaël-Massieux <dom@w3.org>, Ian Jacobs <ian@w3.org>, wai-xtech@w3.org
Steven Pemberton wrote: >>>I don't get the idea of putting the navbar in a <map> (client side image >>>map). What's the point? What do you gain? >>> > >>This is for accessibility reason. See: >>http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#group-bypass >> > > Ooh I hadn't spotted this before. This is weird tag abuse. Can anyone > explain to me what the accessibility advantages are of using a client-side > image map not as a client-side image map, but as a container for links? > > Why is it better than using a <p> or a <div>? The idea was that large groups of links are hard to navigate through for someone accessing a page serially (e.g., who is using a keyboard to navigate serially through a set of links). Rather than ask the author each time to provide an "unsightly" [jump over bunch of links] link, we thought it would be useful for user agents to provide this service. But, we needed markup that user agents can rely on as being "markup that identifies a group of links". The idea was that MAP is already used to identify a group of links, that happen to have a graphical representation. The WAI groups that proposed the change to HTML 4.01 said "Let's use MAP for groups of links even when the representation is non-graphical, as in a group of text links." - Ian -- Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org) http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs Tel: +1 718 260-9447
Received on Thursday, 28 March 2002 08:39:08 UTC