Re: Comments about the 2002-08-05 XHTML 2.0 WD

On Thu, 2002-08-22 at 17:29, Jonas Jørgensen wrote:
> 
> Henri Sivonen wrote:
> > Another thing that I've noticed is that (X)HTML doesn't provide any 
> > semantic markup for indicating which part of the page are main 
> > content and which parts are navigation.
> 
> How about defining the contents of the outer-most <section/> as the main 
> content, and everything outside it as navigation, footers, etc.?
> 
> Example:
> 
> <body>
>    (navigation lists, etc.)
>    <section>
>      <h>Main header</h>
>      (content, subsections, etc.)
>    </section>
>    footer, more navigation, etc.
> </body>
> 
> /Jonas

That doesn't solve the need to specifically indicate which sections are
main navigation. Alternate UAs, search engines, etc. would greatly
benifit from a specific semantic distinction.

Text browsers,devices like PDAs and cell phones have very limited real
estate when it comes to onscreen text. A key combination could be used
to switch between nav and content. (The same could be done for aural
browsers [screen readers]).

A PDA might render a 'nav' screen like this:

    --------------------
    |  SITE MENU:      |
    |  * Item 1        |
    |     * Item 1.1   |
    |  * Item 2        |
    |                  |
    |  RELATED ITEMS:  |
    |  foo             |
    |  bar             |
    |  baz             |
    --------------------

If you've ever browsed anything on a really small you'll instantly see
the benifit of being able to quickly switch between content and an
organised list of links. (Screen readers would benefit in the same way.)

The idea of taking 'everything else' (other than content) seems
inellegant and for many markups totally incorrect. 


The NL element would, at first glance, seem to be what's needed; but the
feeling I get from the RFC is that NL is specifically a menu widget
(when rendered in graphical browsers). An inline SPAN type element
demarking a navigation section would seem to work better.

eg.

    <nav title="Site Menu">
      <nl>
        ... you get the idea
        <li>Item 1</li>
        ... 
      </nl>
    </nav>
    
    ... and at the end of the article ...
    
    <nav title="Related Items">
      <a href="foo">foo</foo>
      <a href="bar">bar</foo>
      <a href="baz">baz</foo>
    </nav>


With no associated graphical rendering any section could be marked up as
navigation. Maybe I'm misinterpretting the intent of NL. If it's intent
is a generalised navigation element -- great! If not -- we might conside
one.

Received on Friday, 23 August 2002 04:15:54 UTC