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Re: Re[2]: Re[2]: Dayton Art Alternative Descriptions

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Nov 10, 2004 9:38AM

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, maryg wrote:

> > Skip navigation links are not, at this point, "extraneous
> > navigation", are they?
>
> I would agree these are not extraneous, but necessary.

I think the point is that when you remove extraneous navigation, you won't
have any substantial navigation to be skipped over. (And then a skip nav
link itself would indeed be extraneous.)

Alternatively, if you put navigation at the end of a page, there's not
much need to skip over it. Rather, the question is how to indicate, to
someone consuming the page in linear order, that he has reached the end of
content proper, so that the rest is navigation or metainformation about
the page.

Users seem to disagree on whether the common "navigation bar" on the left
is useful. So do experts; Nielsen says "less is more" (in navigation).
To some people, it seems to be a "feeling OK" issue: they regard it as
better to have the navigation bar on the left just in case they get lost -
even if they seldom use it, and even if when it turns out to be fairly
useless when they actually try to use it.

I think it is symptomatic that "skip nav" breaks the idea of links as
references. Whenever a link text contains a verb in the imperative,
you are actually trying to create a user interface because your content
has not been adapted to the implied user interfaces in Web browsing.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/