Showing the selected item in navigation lists

I was wondering if anyone thought that adding a 'selected' attribute (or
equivalent) to the <li> tag within an <nl> would be useful for
navigation lists.

I imagine the <nl> tag might be used to implement Table of Contents
columns on web pages. Often one of the items in these lists is the
current page, usually highlighted to show state. A selected attribute
could identify which item (or sub-list, if nested lists were being used)
in a list was the currently selected one.

I'm hoping that in this way the currently selected item in a navigation
list could be easily styled by CSS. If marking one of the navigation
list's items as selected was not available in html, web authors might
choose to show which item was selected with a class attribute on one of
the <li> tags, though this information would be hidden from the page and
unable to be used via script.

Received on Monday, 17 May 2004 13:45:29 UTC