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RE: Printable character between adjacent links

for

From: Jukka Korpela
Date: May 17, 2002 12:10AM

Prof Norm Coombs wrote:

> I hate it because what I hear is something like
> home virtical bar, garage, birtical bar, sidewalk, virtical bar

Or it could be something even worse, if the author has selected the
printable characters in some "creative" way. There are some Unicode
characters that would actually work better as separators between links in
visual presentation, and a person who knows this but does not know all the
potential problems involved might be tempted into using something like
lozenge character.

In this issue, methods that improve accessibility to some people cause
problems to some other people, due to differences in user agents. How should
we weigh these things? In a sense, what you describe is inconvenience only,
whereas the problem of links that "run together" can be functional, an
obstacle to actually using links. But sufficiently strong and common
inconvenience is very serious too.

How about avoiding both problems by using UL markup for lists? We would
still depend on how user agents implement UL lists, and there are even
problems with this - the implementation might not be suitable for lists of
short texts that are links. Some browsers don't make any pause between list
items. Some of them might make too long pauses.

In practice, using UL surely does not solve all the problems of link list
accessibility. But I think it's worth keeping in mind, and in the long run,
it is better suited to presentation that is customized, at the browser
level, according to the needs of the presentation environment and the user.
A user could use a style sheet that handles UL lists, perhaps e.g. making
them all presented as numbered list, if he finds numbering essential for his
understanding. Or a browser could have a function for skipping the rest of a
UL element. Such operations cannot be based, in any simple way, on a mere
sequence of links separated by printable characters, because it is not
marked up as a list.

--
Jukka Korpela
TIEKE Tietoyhteiskunnan kehitt