Re: CSS Speech ideas

> recently (see <http://tinyurl.com/f2nl>), but would it be right to
> have functionality within CSS to do this?

No.  Navigation sections are structural and should be delimited at
the HTML level.

>   * Set the order page items are read (like a z-index for readers?)

Rarely useful as the verbal reading order and the linear visual
reading order will nearly always be the same.   The correct analogy
is with CSS position, not CSS z-index, except that CSS position should
be used to re-arrange the natural reading order into the presentation
one, not the other way round.

> Personally, I believe the ability for a useragent to know exactly what
> is navigation within a page would be *massively* beneficial to users.

Yes, and that is the job of the structural markup language, not the
presentation hinting language.

Personally I think embedded navigation is greatly over used.  Many of
the sites I find most useful hardly have any and I believe that better
browser user interfaces, and better user education (did you know that
you can simulate a frameset from separate navigation and detail pages
on the common GUI browsers by dragging the links from the navigation
page into a detail window - I suppose all the links mis-labelled 
"click here" will have to be re-mis-labelled "drag from here"! :-) [A]).

Separate navigation can also be handled well using the very long
standing, but poorly supported, link element, to associate a separate
navigation page.  Link can also handle the navigational elements that are
useful to contain within leaf pages.  For example, a user agent could
automatically maintain a window open for the contents linked page for
the current detail page.

I wonder if the real reason for so much use of embedded navigation
structures is an attempt to lock users into the site.

This subject was on the w3c-wai-ig list recently.  It comes up quite
often because some accessibility standards call for skip navigation
links.

[A] in reality, navigation links tend to be the only ones that do
follow hypertext conventions, except for not being part of the text!

Received on Tuesday, 24 June 2003 16:36:02 UTC