David Poehlman wrote:
Yeah, I see this and there's something here that just doesn't quite fit but
that I cannot explain. I don't think it would be necessary to wade through
a site to find another wm without bread crumbs and of course you have left
open the search mechanism. I could perhaps quiry for a list of wms?
Absolutely, site search is a great thing to have:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010513.html
But it really doesn't provide the same level of immediate access.
Clicking the Search box, typing in "washing machines" and clicking
Search is lot more effort and a lot more error prone than clicking the
"washing machines" link.
Where site search really comes into its own is when I land on the
Hotpoint ZX800, discover that it doesn't have a combined dryer and then
search for "washing machines with dryer". Or when I've bookmarked the
Hotpoint ZX800 link, but return via my bookmark to the site but now want
to look at ovens, so I type in "ovens".
These various navigational tools (search, menu, page ancestors, sitemap)
all show their strengths in different situations; none of them are
drop-in replacements for one another and often they work in tandem to
help users get around sites.
I really do appreciate the crucial importance of streamlining aural and
braille output, but I think the best long-term solution will be to
provide instant access to the main content of a page via a single tool
command. Today, there's no standard way to do that, so developers fall
back on skip links and users fall back on commands for skipping lists,
links, and blocks.
I'm hopeful the next versions of HTML and XHTML will provide markup to
support this. For example, the current HTML5/XHTML5 draft includes a NAV
element which can be used to firmly distinguish navigation areas of the
page from content areas:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-sections.html#the-nav
Using this a browser or screen reader could offer a "Read page content"
command that doesn't read out navigational areas at all. It could offer
a "Don't read page navigation" checkbox so that when you load a page it
only reads the content unless otherwise requested.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
