Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 08/17/05 22:53

kchayka <usenet@c-net.us> wrote:

> IMO, you have already dealt with "the adjacent links problem" by using
> list markup. The list marker can provide the non-link, printable
> character, even if you hide it via CSS.

It can, but does it?

I suppose you are thinking of a speech browsers that interprets the HTML
source and ignores any CSS (or applies aural features in CSS, in the remote
future). In such a case, list markup is sufficient.

But it is common to use speech browsers that work "upon" graphic browsers,
reading aloud what appears on screen (by checking what characters the I/O
routines send onto screen). They are completely ignorant of the HTML markup
as such; they only "see" the document as formatted with CSS.

> Note that the W3C mentions "Until user agents [do such-and-such]..."
> and that those guidelines are more than 6 years old. User agents have
> come a long way since then, especially those in the assitive technology
> (AT) category.

Unfortunately, the progress has been slow.

But there's more. Think about seeing, on a graphic browser, links like

foo bar zap zip zap zup ump

Are there seven links, or less? Maybe "foo bar" is one link? If links are
underlined, breaks in underlining may give a hint. Too subtle?

There are various approaches to such problems, and you might ultimately
decide to ignore some of the problems. But separating adjacent links is
still an issue, and will always be.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

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