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RE: Skip Nav and the <link> tag

for

From: Chris Heilmann
Date: May 11, 2004 3:38PM

> Hi Sandy
>
> <snip>
> I recently got a question from someone who is trying to figure out
> whether their parent site is using something correctly.
>
> <link rel="skip to content" href="#page-content" title="Jump to this
> page's content" /> <link rel="skip to navigation"
> href="#page-navigation" title="Jump to this page's navigation links" />
>
> And respectively in the body:
>
> <td valign="top" rowspan="2" id="page-content"></td>
> <td valign="top" id="page-navigation"></td>
> </snip>
>
> That use for the <link> element is intended as a logical link between
> documents, not a hyperlink within a doc. As far as I know, none of the
> browsers currently do anything particularly useful with <link rel="home"
> href="/home.html" />... It's a suggestion for future-proofing that will,
> at some point, be used to give the user some idea of the page's position
> within a set of pages and perhaps be used to generate some alternate
> navigation. I could be wrong about that...


It is actually nothing new, as it had been around for some while[1], and
is meant to link documents together to a big document.


Opera 7.5 displays the links in an extra toolbar, and there are extensions
for Mozilla[2] and IE[3] available to do so.


The nice thing about mozilla is that it caches next and prev pages, which
speeds things up a bit when browsing a big bunch of documents.


I wrote a small Javascript that generates a dropdown with all the
navigation links, I'll show it soon here, as part of a site check, if
anyone is interested, mail me about it.


> For skip links you'd be better off using <a href="#page-content"
> title="jump to the page's content">skip to content</a>.


Full ACK, also, as skip links should be visible.


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32#link
[2] http://cdn.mozdev.org/linkToolbar/
[3] http://www.draig.de/LinkBar/index.en.html


--
Chris Heilmann
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