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Re: Skip links and SEO

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From: Patrick Lauke
Date: May 2, 2007 11:30AM

> Michael R. Burks
> Why hide the skip links at all?
>
> I find them useful.
>
> Others may as well. Or are we only building pages that cater to one
> disability?

The larger discussion here should be: why don't all user agents provide reasonable ways to navigate via keyboard, jumping over block level elements etc (Opera leads the pack here)?
Skip links are stop-gap solutions that *content* authors add to their pages to make up for lack of functionality in current browsers, IMHO.

Secondly, it's not really a problem to have a hidden skip link, as long as it's visible (in an obvious place, where the user would expect it...if it's the first link in the tab cycle, this would be top-left of the page) when it receives focus - I did this ages ago on Molly's site www.molly.com, and the same technique was adapted for the WaSP site www.webstandards.org

P