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Off-left vs. block/none oddity.

for

From: Christian Heilmann
Date: Feb 3, 2006 7:30AM

I did a demo of a Outlook style panel for a friend yesterday:
http://www.icant.co.uk/sandbox/dom-panel-bar/

Now, normally I am advocating and using the off-left technique for
hiding and showing elements, but as I was lazy in this case I used
display block and none in JavaScript instead.

Funnily enough, this seems to have made it a lot easier to use the
menu with a keyboard now as the hidden links don't show up in the tab
order unless you activate one of the parent links.

The question now is how screen readers deal with the activation and
navigation in it. If that is fine, I think it is a more obvious choice
for JavaScript driven menus to go the block/none way - pending you
don't hide the elements via CSS from the beginning.

Thoughts?

--
Chris Heilmann
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/