WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Off-left vs. block/none oddity.

for

From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Feb 3, 2006 10:30AM

On 2/3/06, Christian Heilmann < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> > > Don't most hacks like this imply some sort of basic problem in the
> > > underlying structure of your content presentation?

> It would help to tell us what you mean by "hack"?

Using standard markup and styles to produce something generally
desirable in a way which was not specifically intended nor even
implied in the specification.

For example, hiding visibility by placing something way out in left
field (literally) as a way of making some content available to some
users, and not available to other users. Or, using positioning styles
to temporarily hide something from view, which is "by spec" meant to
be done in a way that doesn't involve positioning.

> > Not necessarily. The structure here is fine, but the usability may not
> > be ideal. Not strictly a hack, but an enhancement?

> That is the idea. Ever since the first DHTML multi level dropdown menu
> popped up on the web clients go apesh^H^H^H^H^H^H very excited about
> this prospect.

It's nice that Web clients want it. Web clients are often idiots,
though, and whatever they go apeshit over may not be best practices,
unless by "best practices" you mean "any hack to earn a buck."

> We all know it is not a need to offer that much
> navigation on every page, but go and try to tell clients that.

Why not tell them that?

What do users think?

What do your user studies show you, that you can then take to your clients?

I mean, if the users are for it, that's one thing, but you're not
arguing here that users are demanding menus or hidden text; you're
arguing that clients want it. You would be arguing on stronger
grounds if you had any sort of evidence to offer that this is good for
the Web. (And by good for the Web, I mean good for the Web user.)

(There may very well be an argument that users want these menus; I
don't know. Hierarchical menus have a problem of hiding links that
could or should be obvious at various times; it takes a lot of work
and a lot of testing to create a particularly well-done hierarchical,
collapsing menu user interface.)

> Reloads
> seem to be the most scary thing on this planet, smothering content in
> 300 links / page is OK though :-)

You have weird clients.

--Kynn