[whatwg] Menus, fallback, and backwards compatibility: ideas wanted

[Sander Tekelenburg]

At 11:39 +0600 UTC, on 2005/12/15, Alexey Feldgendler 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.

Don't forget that the current HTML spec
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links>
[1] also specifies a "section" value
[2] says "Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in
this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the
conventions used to define the link types."

I had never used "section" but just now I've added it to my personal site
(URL in sig below), to try how flexible it is. I get the impression it could
work well for lots of sites.

Where it doesn't provide enough flexibility, the profile attribute
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#adef-profile> might offer a
solution, but I'm not aware of any implementations and as such it is unclear
to me how as an author you would use profile.

And of course
[1] there is the possibility of defining more LINK types in the spec.
[2] this doesn't necessarily have to concentrate on lINK, but could
concentrate on the construction <nav><menu><A rel="value"
href="URL">home</A></menu</nav>.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>