On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 07:07:29 +0600, Ian Hickson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Absolute navigation includes links to fixed pages, the same on all pages
of the site. Usually these are links to top-level sections and
subsections thereof. Following an absolute link is like skipping to a
fixed vertex in a graph, or resolving an absolute pathname on a
filesystem. The absolute navigation is somewhat covered with the <link>
mechanism (rel="toc", for example), but it's not enough because the
fixed nodes referenced by absolute navigation is rarely described with
specific roles like "TOC"; more often, these are just top-level sections
of the site.
Like <link rel="section" title="Products" ...>?
Sort of that. But this can't be used to express a structure of nested
sections. (We need that to build a good menu in the browser's UI.)
Currently, we have <link> which works great in browsers which
understand it.
Which is roughly none of them.
Recent versions of Mozilla and Opera do. AFAIK Safari does, too. Of
course, the total marketshare of all these is less than IE's, but I think
IE7 will support <link>, too. BTW, I've enabled the links toolbar in
Opera, and I can instantly see when a site offers <link> navigation.
Actually, many sites do, and most often these are sites which use some CMS.
For those who don't, authors usually duplicate relative navigation in
the page body. For absolute navigation, though, they have no choice
because there is no appropriate mechanism similar to <link> to instruct
browsers to include absolute navigation somewhere in its UI outside the
viewport.
Realistically speaking, authors don't use <link> anyway, though, as mpt
pointed out.
Authors don't, CMS do. If IE7 starts supporting <link>, evem more CMS will
use it.
It's less abstract as far as the authors are concerned, because to them
there is a direct relationship between the document.write() and what they
see on their screen, as opposed to an indirect one that depends on the UA
implementor's idea of navigation.
Yes! I think that's the point, that's why I skipped quotation of most text
above this.
"Draw it by hand in the viewport" or "Let the browser show it to the
user". It's the same old story. Authors tend to describe every aspect of
visualization in their CSS. Why? Because different browsers have different
default rules, and the author wants the page to look the same in all
browsers. The author wants it so much that he would never trust the
browser to draw a menu without having full control about the fonts,
colors, sizes etc. And it would miss the entire point of having a site's
menu integrated into the browser's UI: the browser should show the site's
menu items just like it shows its own menu items, so they seem
intergrated. The browser's menu isn't an extension of the viewport.
-- Opera M2 9.0 TP1 on Debian Linux 2.6.12-1-k7
* Origin: X-Man's Station at SW-Soft, Inc. [ICQ: 115226275]
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
