[whatwg] Small consistency issue with HTML5 nav element examples

Wed May 4 11:45:54 PDT 2011

On Fri, 14 Jan 2011, Nicholas Zakas wrote:
>
> In section 4.4.5 (the aside element), an example is given that shows 
> <nav> being used within <footer>.
> 
> Section 4.4.3 (the nav element), explains that this would be an 
> inappropriate use of <nav> 
> (http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-nav-element):
> 
> "Not all groups of links on a page need to be in a nav element - only 
> sections that consist of major navigation blocks are appropriate for the 
> nav element. In particular, it is common for footers to have a short 
> list of links to various pages of a site, such as the terms of service, 
> the home page, and a copyright page. The footer element alone is 
> sufficient for such cases, without a nav element."
> 
> Minor inconsistency, but felt it was worth pointing out to avoid 
> confusion.

On Fri, 14 Jan 2011, Ian Hickson wrote:
> 
> It doesn't say it's inappropriate, [just] that it's not necessary. It's 
> still fine to use it there. I'll try to clarify that.

I've updated the advice in the <nav> section accordingly, and made the 
advice explicitly non-normative.

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011, Bjartur Thorlacius wrote:
> On 1/24/11, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Mon, 24 Jan 2011, Bjartur Thorlacius wrote:
> >>
> >> But then, when should hyperlinks be created with <link>s?
> >
> > More or less never. <link> links don't show on most Web browsers.
>
> IMO browsers should implement <link>. <link> should be implementable 
> cross-browser in CSS.

Unfortunately, what we want and what we get don't always match. :-)

> >> Navigation links are clearly metadata, belonging to <head>.
> >
> > How do you distinguish what is data vs what is metadata?
>
> Generally, I categorize everything which isn't mentioned in the <title> 
> or Content-Description (or would be, as there's usually none). No 
> document would be described as "
> 
> My actual concern regard navigation links not forming a part of the 
> linear body of the document, but still being in <body>. Navigation links 
> will most likely be rendered "out of band," potentially only on demand 
> and paged/scrolled seperately from the body, or at the end of the 
> document in one dimensional renderings (such as audio and text streams). 
> They might even be triggered without being rendered at all, such as by 
> scrolling out of range of the current document.

It seems most authors desire far more control over their navigation links. 
On many pages, it's almost as if the navigation links are more important 
to the authors than the content, at least when you look at the amount 
of effort put into them...

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'