On 1/18/06, Taco Fleur - Pacific Fox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I could be completely wrong here, and I am sure you will tell me so if
> that's the case.
> But I would think that a menu that has sub menus would need to be displayed
> as the following for it to be semantically correct;
>
> <ol>
>         <li>
>                 <a href="#"></a>
>                 <ol>
>                         <li>
>                                 <a href="#"></a>
>                                 <ol>
>                                         <li>
>                                                 <a href="#"></a>
>                                         </li>
>                                 </ol>
>                         </li>
>                 </ol>
>         </li>
> </ol>
>
> Am I wrong? As for pointing out the ones that aren't, I won't go there.
>

The problem with using an ordered list is that there is no progression
from the first item to the last. There is no chronological or
methodical progression that justifies starting from the first item and
going through all the items to get to the last one. A navigation list
is just a list of links, which all lead to different pages, and
therefore are all equal. You don't have to follow the first link
first, you can just click on the fourth one if that's where you want
to go. So other than the order of the content, which is structural,
there is no reason to have numbers.
Bruce Lawson talks about the accessibility of a navigation list marked
up with a UL and screenreaders [1], and all that matters is that the
navigation is a list, and not whether there are numbers as well.

XHTML 2.0 will have navigation lists [2], which look like:

<nl>
   <label>Contents </label>
   <li href="#introduction">Introduction</li>
   <li>
      <nl>
          <label>Terms</label>
          <li href="#may">May</li>
          <li href="#must">Must</li>
          <li href="#should">Should</li>
      </nl>
   </li>
   <li href="#conformance">Conformance</li>
   <li href="#references">References</li>
   ...
</nl>

Well, "label" might be replaced with "name." [3] Not that this matters
since XHTML 2.0 won't be supported for years. But I digress.

[1] http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/index.php/2005/navigation-lists/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-list.html#sec_11.2.
[3] http://w3future.com/weblog/gems/xhtml2.xml

--
--
Christian Montoya
christianmontoya.com ... rdpdesign.com ... cssliquid.com
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