On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 01:39:45PM +0100, Kate L Pugh wrote:
On Thu 10 Jun 2004, Stephen Stewart beowulf@carisenda.com wrote:
Make your navbar a <ul> element instead of DIV soup, that way you don't have to add those /'s in. The HTML may pass the letter of the WAI law, but a screen reader would have no clue about the relation of one DIV to another. The <ul> should have contextual markers, start of list, end of list, which would be the only 'hidden' content.
When we were deciding how to do the template overhauls, Earle told me that using <ul>s and so on is a bad thing, but I can't remember why. Earle, can you remind us?
Unless Earle comes up with some lore of which I am not familiar, and tcha, that's not going to happen, <ul> or <ol> are better than the <div> structure you currently use. The common all garden <div> has no semantic meaning, other than box, and when you view a menu using div's a client looking for meaning in the structure, rather than the style, will go snow blind.
While I'm here you should use the HTML header tags <h1>, <h2> etc instead of: <strong><a href="http://london.openguides.org/index.cgi">The Open Guide to London</a></strong>
Again, this has no meaning outside of style, well it does actually, it means strong emphasis on 'The Open Guide to London', which is not the same as saying that it's a header, nor that's it's simply bold text. A screen reader might read that line in the same tone it would read the word 'furious' from the following: I'm not mad I'm *furious*! (http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2004/05/02/b-and-i # for more on strong vrs bold) Anyway, I'd advise use of the <h1>, <h2>, etc tags for headers.
My 2p's worth.
Stephen