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Re: breadcrumb navigation

for

From: Tim Beadle
Date: Nov 30, 2004 3:08AM

OK here's (I hope) my last word. Then we can move on.

"michael.brockington" wrote on
29/11/2004 16:51:07:
> Since we have ended up agreeing that the original suggestion of
image-based
> technique was not the best one in this instance, I shall make this my
last
> word on the subject...

No, *you* ended up stating that the image-based teqchique was *evil, evil,
evil* and should *never* be used :)

The only thing we agreed on was that "structure is important". I'm not
sure we agreed what "structure" actually meant, though.

> The visual (and aural occasionaly) representation is the most important
> thing. Perhaps the CSS mantra of seperating Display from Content has
gone
> too far - after all one of the WCAG guidelines is to ensure that the
document
> remains usable with all 'features' (scripting, images and even CSS)
turned
> off. Remove all of the s and s and a document becomes little
more
> than a bunch of bytes.

Patrick already addressed this, but who said anything about removing s
and s? The CSS styling hooks into the logical structure of the
underlying document; whether you style a border with the css border:
directive or use the background: directive to add a vertical rule makes no
difference to the underlying document structure. Believe me, Dan Cederholm
(the author of the Faux Columns article) is a standards-based developer
who's written a book (Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style
Handbook) that addresses usability, accessibility and semantic concerns.

Take a look at Dan's SimpleQuiz series, which inspired the book:
http://www.simplebits.com/notebook/simplequiz/

> Perhaps that's not what you meant, but you seem to be putting the cart
before
> the horse, although my point was that many people seem to be doing that
these
> days, so don't take any of this personally. (After all we know very
little
> about each other really...)

This is true: we don't know eachother, but you really don't seem to have
grasped the basic concept that I was proposing, and that of a
standards-based, *attractive* design solution. There are too many
one-pixel dashed-border CSS-based sites. Let's push the boundaries a bit,
while still degrading gracefully to well-structured documents for older,
less capable user agents and assistive tech.

Regards,

Tim



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