Regarding the <nav> HTML5 tag.
What is the difference between this:
<nav>
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>News</li>
<li>Photos</li>
<ul>
</nav>
and this: (can this work?)
<nav>
<li>Home</li>
<li>News</li>
<li>Photos</li>
</nav>
You cannot put li elements outside of a ul/ol.
But you don't have to use a list at all. You can just put those a tags directly under the nav:
<nav>
Home
News
Photos
</nav>
For a little more history and a more thorough exploration, read this:
Navigation in Lists: To Be or Not To Be.
<li> is not valid outside of ul or ol based on the contexts in which it can be used. This definition is very strict.
As for <nav>, its content model is flow content. <li> is not a flow content element. In the same vein, <nav> does not have to contain a list (either <ul> or <ol>).
My understinding is that navigation lists are better supported by screen readers and better for search engine optimization since search engines won't penalize you for the repetition of the list on pages. If you avoid the list, they might. I have absolutely no evidence to back this up -- it's just anecdotal.
Personally, I would go with the simplest valid HTML. That is just <nav> and <a> children.
Related
I've learned to make the main navigation with a list like that:
<ul>
<li>nav-item</li>
</ul>
Now additionally, I need two top navigations, one left for social buttons and another right for other things. Someone told me better to build those top navigations by 2 like that:
<div>
top-nav-item
</div>
And I'm confused. Why is that better? Could someone tell me the advantage of the second way?
Thank you~
I would recommend using <nav> elements, which is HTML5 spec (see also here). Semantically it fits better with navigational elements, and it might help understand search engines better what elements of your website they are looking at. You can put <a> elements inside the <nav>. A search engine might be able to better understand that those are links to other pages, because that is what anchor elements are made for (linking to other pieces of content).
For how it looks, it doesn't matter; pretty much all elements can be made to look like a menu with buttons. Furthermore, search engines are pretty smart nowadays, and they will probably understand most of your website anyway, even if you don't use the proper elements all the time.
That being said, those elements are there for a reason, so why not use them?
The mozilla developer network's example that I reference above uses the following, but to me personally it does not necessarily always make sense to put everything in a <ul> element.
<nav class="menu">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>About</li>
<li>Contact</li>
</ul>
</nav>
Why is that better?
It isn't.
HTML is a semantic markup language. It is designed to describe the semantics of your data.
You have a list of links.
The markup should express that it is a list of links not a series of generic blocks with links in them.
I have created example that you want please check below link.
Click on Run.
.nav{float:left;}
.nav li,.social li{float: left;margin-right: 22px;list-style: none;}
.social{float:right;}
<header>
<ul class="nav">
<li>Home</li>
<li>About us</li>
<li>Contact</li>
</ul>
<ul class="social">
<li>Facebook</li>
<li>Google</li>
</ul>
</header>
I'm building this menu with an <ul> tag, that will have a title and then the correspondent menus. I wanted to know how is the best practice with this kind of task and SEO too.
I though about:
<ul>
<li><h2>Books</h2></li>
<li>Portuguese</li>
<li>Italian</li>
<li><h2>Movies</h2></li>
<li>Indonesia</li>
<li>Thailand</li>
</ul>
and:
<h2>Books</h2>
<ul>
<li>Portuguese</li>
<li>Italian</li>
</ul>
<h2>Movies</h2>
<ul>
<li>Indonesia</li>
<li>Thailand</li>
</ul>
Is there a better approach? If not, which of these two is better, and why?
The second way because the first one will be rendering the h2 element inside of the unordered list. Another reason is that the second one is just cleaner and easier to manage what you have.
Mix of both is better:
<ul>
<li>
<h2>Books</h2>
<ul>
<li>Portuguese</li>
<li>Italian</li>
</ul>
</li>
<ul>
It's a lot easier to do menu more interactive this way. Take a look here.
What can be done to improve the accessibility of a breadcrumb menu similar to:
<ul class="breadcrumbs" aria-label="breadcrumb navigation" role="navigation">
<li>Home</li>
<li>News</li>
<li class="unavailable">#Model.Title</li>
</ul>
Given in this example Home is the site root, News is the first child, and the unavailable class is the current item the /news/article item.
Is there anything that could be done to improve this such as using rel attributes or aria-level attributes?
I would avoid the use of aria-level and use a <ol> element instead. It is best to avoid using aria attributes wherever a native alternative exists. Using aria adds an extra layer of complexity. Simple HTML is far better and already has semantics that are surfaced to AT. This is the first rule of ARIA.
Borrowing from the WAI-ARIA-Practices document, breadcrumbs would look like something like this:
<nav aria-label="Breadcrumb" class="breadcrumb">
<ol>
<li>
<a href="../../">
WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1
</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="../../#aria_ex">
Design Patterns
</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="../../#breadcrumb">
Breadcrumb Pattern
</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="./index.html" aria-current="page">
Breadcrumb Example
</a>
</li>
</ol>
</nav>
Some notes:
Wrapping the breadcrumbs in a <nav> element lets screen reader users quickly find and jump to the breadcrumbs.
Using <ol> element surfaces an order to screen reader users.
The <ol> should be a child of the <nav>. Some implementations apply role="nav" to the <ol> itself. This is wrong and will override the default <ol> semantics.
aria-current informs screen reader users that this is the current page. If the last breadcrumb for the current page is not a link, the aria-current attribute is optional.
Going from using a screen reader and reading this blog post, the rel attributes won't make a difference to A.T. As for using aria-level, it works if you put it on the anchor tags. I'd also advise wrapping the list in a nav element, for semantic purposes and to save the need of putting a navigation role on the list when you don't need to.
I wound up with this markup for what I think is a not-too-bad breadcrumb. Hide the bullets using CSS (I didn't stop to do that I'm afraid) and I'd say its good.
<nav aria-label="breadcrumb" role="navigation">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>News</li>
</ul>
</nav>
Hope this helps!
You can use like below
<nav role="navigation" aria-label="breadcrumbs">
<p id="breadcrumblabel">You are here:</p>
<ol id="breadcrumb" aria-labelledby="breadcrumblabel">
<li>Home</li>
<li>Menu1</li>
<li>Menu2</li>
</ol>
</nav>
When searching the Web for a thorough solution on accessible breadcrumbs, #Craig Brett's solution seemed good at first sight. But after reading several sources, aria-level seems to be misused there (besides a W3C Validation problem, see my comment above).
Therefor I like to propose this approach:
<nav aria-labelledby="bc-title" role="navigation">
<h6 id="bc-title" class="vis-off">You are here:</h6>
<a href="~/" aria-labelledby="bc-level-1">
<span id="bc-level-1" class="vis-off">Homepage Website-Title </span>Home
</a>
<a href="~/news" aria-labelledby="bc-level-2">
<span id="bc-level-2" class="vis-off">Level 2: News </span>News
</a>
#Model.Title
</nav>
In this solution we have an HTML5 sectioning element (nav), which should have a heading, and *tada* there it is. Class vis-off signifies an element that is just available to screen readers. With aria-labelledby I'm telling the screen reader to read that headline.
In contrast to Chris' solution, either the <ul> or aria-level is gone.
I'd so or so go for an <ol> if necessary, because the items are in order. Better leaving it out, otherwise it gets very verbose in many screen readers on every page ("List item 1…").
aria-level seems to be misused in the solution above in my understanding. It must be child of a role attribute like f.e. role="list" and that role just signifies not structurally marked-up non-interactive lists.
Maybe a role treeitem might be more appropriate. IMHO it's overkill.
PS: I'm not using BEM notation here to shorten the ids and classes for readability.
I'm always trying to use the new html5 elements, but find myself doing stuff like this:
<nav class="some-menu">
<ul class="menu">
<li>
<a title="link to somewhere" href="the-link.php">link to somewhere</a>
</li>
</ul>
</nav>
When I could have achieved the same (visually) with:
<ul class="menu">
<li>
<a title="link to somewhere" href="the-link.php">link to somewhere</a>
</li>
</ul>
More symantic markup vs bloated DOM, should I include the <nav> tag in that situation?
EDIT
I've found the <menu> item can actually be used in this situation along with <li> e.g:
<menu class="side-menu">
<li><a title="a menu item" href="touch-my-nipples.thanks">Inappropriate Href</a>
</menu>
Which achieves more semantic markup without verbosity
Well you could argue that not including html5 tags increases the readability of your html file.
However, for SEO purposes, using html5 tags may assist in your page rank, so that might be a consideration if you are developing for a commercial web page.
In this one particular case, if the purpose of the <li> is not for navigation, then it I doubt you would get any criticism for it.
This is a good question. More DOM == more time to load the page, which is not good. However, you could try to use a combination of both. How about simply doing something like this:
<nav class="menu">
<a class="menu-item" href="...">Link 1</a>
<a class="menu-item" href="...">Link 2</a>
</nav>
I don't think there is a huge benefit to one over the other, though you should test to see how this appears to different screen reader users (as accessibility may be benefit of semantic markup).
It's not just about code bloat, don't forget about accessibility. By having a <nav> element, you can tell user's screen readers where the menu is. It would be difficult to detect if it was just ul.menu.
As Denis mentions, there are also advantages for SEO rankings.
"the element which allows you to group together links, resulting in more semantic markup and extra structure which may help screenreaders."
By: http://html5doctor.com/nav-element/
Example:
<nav>
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>About</li>
</ul>
</nav>
Good idea use because: internal links for site navigation
<menu> tag
The HTML element represents an unordered list of ""menu"" choices, or commands.
By: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/menu
Can we use multiple tags on the same page in html5?
I've read this article on Zeldman.com but it's not entirely clear to me
i.e.
<header><nav>links here</nav></header>
<footer><nav>links here</nav></footer>
Yes, absolutely. You can have multiple header, nav, and footer tags sans penalty.
As long as you're making sure you are using tags semantically and you aren't putting them in invalid places (they're block-level elements, so you can't put them inside an inline element, for example) then you shouldn't worry too much about what the sticklers are saying. It's all to easy to get caught up arguing about tiny details instead of moving forward on your project.
Yes, having multiple <nav> elements is absolutely ok.
You just have to make sure you're making them distinguishable for people using screen readers. You can do it by labelling each <nav> using aria-label.
<nav aria-label=’primary’>
<ul>
...List on links here...
</ul>
</nav>
<nav aria-label=’secondary’>
<ul>
...List on links here...
</ul>
</nav>
Or, if one of the <nav> as visible text on screen that can be identified as labelling element, you can use aria-labelledby like follows:
<nav aria-label="Site Menu">
<ul>
...List on links here...
</ul>
</nav>
<article>
<h1>Title</h1>
...
<nav aria-labelledby="id-1">
<h2 id="id-1">
Related Content
</h2>
<ul>
...List on links here...
</ul>
</nav>
</article>
You can read more about using Multiple Navigation Landmarks.
The answer is yes. You can have a <nav> tag in the footer, for more info check mdn <nav> documentation.