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Re: Delimiting links...characters or use a DL?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Dec 16, 2004 9:49AM

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, darrel.austin wrote:

> One of the items on our site is a toolbar of links across the top. Right
> now, I'm simply separating the links via the '|' character.

That's probably feasible, since it's common practice. People are used to
hearing "vertical bar" or something like that, though it's odd when you
hear it for the first time.

As an alternative, you could use a small image (maybe "|" shaped) with
alt=", ".

> I've been a fan of this approach, however:
>
> http://www.baekdal.com/example.asp
>
> which uses a lot of definition lists

That's not adequate use of definition list. A menu does not define what
the term "Main Navigation" means. This has been discussed at length on
different fora, but the bottom line is: is just a tag soup HTML used
to achieve particular layout, except in the rare cases where you really
have a list of definitions (typically, a glossary). Using adequate markup
is part of WAI rules (violated by W3C itself, but I digress).

The most adequate markup for a list of links in current HTML is a
element with element inside each element. This is good for
accessibility too. If a checking tool complains (about lack of nonspace
characters between links), blame the tool.

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