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From: John Watts
Date: Apr 7, 2008 5:40PM

Hi,

Interesting discussion indeed. I'd like to make a couple points:

>- It's a pain to code unless you use CSS and absolute positioning.

CSS yes, absolute positioning no. Many other modern layouts use floats (a couple links below). In an ideal world, table-driven designs should be consigned to the scrap heap.

>If users disable styles, suddenly the order is different than what they saw visually.

I'm not sure when users would be constantly enabling and disabling styles. I would have assumed that users would have the page styled to accommodate their disability and leave it (screen styles for the deaf, unstyled for users of braille readers, and perhaps soon the speech styles for the blind). If there is some value to enabling and then disabling and then enabling styles as you visit each page, please let me know.

>It breaks the convention used by probably 99.9% of web sites

Layout repositories contain many templates that place the nav before content. The eminent A List Apart has even published a couple modern CSS layouts which do just that.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/multicolumnlayouts
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail

I can't say that most sites are ordering their source like this, but I'm certain they number much more than 0.1%

>Now, instead of having to navigate to or past navigation (which should be fairly consistent) in order to find the
>content, users must now navigate through an unknown and variable number of links in content to find
>the navigation.

If I go to a page, am I most interested in the content of the page or its navigation menu? Should I have to constantly tab through the nav to reach the stuff I'm really interested in? And what if the nav is really long? The size of the nav could vary as it opens new sub-menus as you navigate deeper into the site, I've certainly seen (for better or worse) extremely large nav menus.

The points made in favour of placing the content first are better explained by someone much more eloquent than I (Mark Pilgrim is a former accessibility architect for IBM).
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_10_presenting_your_main_content_first.html

In addition to Pilgrim's examples, the OP seemed to indicate that with his mobility impairment, tabbing through the stuff he doesn't want to get to the stuff he does want is not ideal for him.

Regards,

John








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