Hello, I have been, since forever, using unordered lists to mark up navigation links. This seems to be the "standard" recommended method used by all the people in the know. Depending on the situation, the list will be styled vertically or horizontally. No problem there.
However, when CSS is disabled (or when no stylesheet is served for old old browsers), all these links appear as vertical lists with bullets. A screen reader will, I suppose, pronounce "bullet" every time before every item as shown in Fangs. Now, this is not an issue when the list is four or five items long, but when it gets to ten items or more, I find the long vertical list to be obstrusive. I am working on a site that has a main navigation menu, styled inline, near the top with ten links to the ten major parts of the site. And in one section of the site, all the pages also have have a second horizontal navigation menu with the twenty six letters of the alphabet. Without CSS, this makes for a very long, very narrow, list of links that you have to scroll past to get to the meat of the page. Yes, I do have a "skip navigation" and "go to content" menu at the very top, but still, I have a problem with this. An alternative solution is to put all the links in a <nav> with no list (I'm using html5 elements). The links will then appear on one line when CSS is disabled. I'm not sure yet if a <p> in the <nav> would be necessary for old browsers. The items can be separated by a non-breaking space for readability. I am trying to apply "best practices" and make my markup as semantically correct as possible so I have some questions: Is there a compelling reason to keep the lists? Would the markup be dramatically unsemantic without them? What do you people think? Thanks, Ellen ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
