[html5] <nav> for external links?

Fri Apr 29 08:40:58 PDT 2011

On 4/29/11, Jukka K. Korpela <jukka.k.korpela at kolumbus.fi> wrote:
> Bjartur Thorlacius wrote:
>
>> How is one to decide when to use
>> <div><nav><ol><a></a>..</ol></nav></div> rather than
>> <head><link>..</head>?
>
> The former is for navigational tools in the document, typically for visible
> links that the user can click on. The latter declares relationships to other
> documents, without implying that they should be useable in any particular
> way.
>
> The idea of using elements like <link rel="next" href="..."> to specify
> relationships that browsers would implement as part of their own
> navigational menus was interesting. It was implemented in some versions of
> Firefox, though few users ever noticed it, and it still has some support in
> Opera. But it has become a pointless idea, due to lack of browser vendors'
> enthusiasm to support it prominently and due to lack of a useful set of
> standardized rel attribute values (in HTML5, the set has actually been
> reduced rather than improved and extended - there aren't even values for
> such extremely common relations like "parent page" and "top page", and
> generally the rel value mess is the same as in the 1990s, if not worse).
>
> It would probably be better to specify that rel values such as "next" are
> _not_ allowed in <link> elements. This would help authors in avoiding
> illusions, like setting up assumed relations that are ignored by most user
> agents
>
>> Also, putting <nav> inside <body> seems confusing to me, as it's
>> clearly never to be part of the body.
>
> By definition, the <body> element is the entire document to be presented to
> the user, including any navigation, top banner, footer, and aside stuff.
> It's all there is, except that the <head> element contains _metadata_ that
> may affect _how_ the body is presented.
>
So you're arguing that <head> should contain only <script>s and <style>s?
Information in <body> is highly context sensitive, but information in
<head> may be rendered before the <body>, after or injected into it. I
find
<head>
 <link rel="related" type="image/jpeg" href=./complementary-image>
</head>
more logical than
<body>
 <aside>
  <img src="./complementary-image" type="image/jpeg" alt="">
 </aside>
</body>

<title> and <link>s belong in <head>.