Clarification on navindex and anchors for XHTML 2.0?

Until now, no HTML specification I believe has documented how to handle
the navindex navigation when entering a document not at its beginning.
This probably means that the default behavior should be applied, which I
think is not optimal. 

Let me explain what I mean: let's say you follow a link to
http://www.example.org/foo#bar
and that this XHTML document is as follows:
<html>
<head><title>Example</title></head>
<body>
<div><a href="/" navindex="1"><img src="logo" alt="Our great
logo"/></div>
<p>Lots of text <a href="foobar" navindex="2">link</a></p>

<div id="bar">
<p>Here is the interesting part with this <a href="toto">interesting
link</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

Currently, the algorithm defined in the specification means that the
first link encountered when hitting the navigation key will be the one
at the very beginning of the document, namely very far of the target of
the link. I think it should instead ignore the preceding navindex values
until it cycles to the top of the page.

I found this as being problematic when designing an accessible version
of W3C mailing list archives [1].

Regards,

Dom

1. http://www.w3.org/2002/03/archives-improvements/
-- 
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux - http://www.w3.org/People/Dom/
W3C/INRIA
mailto:dom@w3.org

Received on Tuesday, 6 August 2002 09:26:20 UTC