I notice that the HTML5 Working Draft 22 March 2008 states that "The bookmark
keyword may be used with a and area elements" and seems to forbid the use of
rel=bookmark with LINK elements.
Do not do ban this idiom with LINK elements. There's no earthly reason to and
it's a missed opportunity.
I suggest that
link rel="bookmark" href="#id" title="Description of fragment of this
document"
is an incredibly useful technique for accessibility enhancements. In fact I
suggest that you promote this technique.
The critical point about this idiom is that the target href is a fragment
identifier within _the current document_ (that is href="#id_something"), and
that it is a way of exposing to the UA and to the user a set of significant
entry points in the document.
For example
(1) link rel="bookmark" href="#nav" title="Navigation"
(2) link rel="bookmark" href="#maincontent" title="Main content"
link rel="bookmark" href="#secondarycontent" title="Secondary content"
(3) link rel="bookmark" href="#switchlang" title="Other languages"
Hopefully examples (1), (2) are self-explanatory. Example taken from a
multilingual website (3) exposes the section of the current document that
contains a navigation list with links to alternative language versions of the
document and allows the user to switch to a different language.
I suggest inserting a paragraph describing this idiom's usefulness as way of
exposing to the UA and to the user a set of significant entry points in the
document.
This technique could serve as a safe replacement for the discredited accesskey
feature. It is discoverable, machine readable and self documenting. UAs
(and/or javascript enhancement functions) could even build a table of such
entries for the user to pick from.
If you feel that changing to a new different rel=keyword would be better, maybe
we should do so.
But there is a fantastic opportunity here, however we do it.
Thoughts?
Cecil Ward.
