[html5] <nav> for external links?

Thu Apr 28 19:57:15 PDT 2011

> In this case, we are paying the Associated Press for news content
> (print and online), and one of the things they provide is digital news
> content (headlines and summary text) that we can put on our site; when
> a user clicks a headline, they get taken to the AP's
> server/host/domain name (I don't think we can setup a CNAME in this
> case).
>

In this case, your "headlines", or "collection of links", is part of your 
content.

Ian hickson made a useful twitter post not long ago, where he explained:
  "A search results page's results would not be <nav>, though, since they 
aren't navigation, but main content."

The same can be said about a news site, who is having a collection of links, 
either to its own on-domain, or off domain pages.

And i guess there would be cases where its fine to link to off-domain 
content, but it got to come down to a few obsure cases.
An examble would be if you where running multiple sites, who is sharing the 
same privacy policy, to avoid maintaining one for each site. But I'm sure 
there would be other siturations as well.

>How is one to decide when to use
><div><nav><ol><a></a>..</ol></nav></div> rather than
><head><link>..</head>?

Anytime basically. I'm not sure why anyone would use the head linkage 
method, now that we got a better alternative, since its poorly supported by 
browsers, and since you would most likely still want to markup a navigation 
list separately for visual browsers.

The link element is obsessed about the "documental idea" about the web, 
which i think is totally incorrect.
The head method makes sense for documents i think, but doesn't make much 
sense for web pages, which can be looked at, as small content management 
applications.
Documents can be more static, and more dependent on the viewer app to 
control visual appearance of the content.

Its a very bad idea to have siturations where a web-designer would need to 
do twice his work, just to add sopport, or make things easier for certain 
users.
It would be better to give specific markup elements, for use in specific 
situations. This would likely also force "professionals", to at least 
implement these elements, where they would otherwise have an easier excuse.

Jacob Kristensen
http://blueboden.com/