pageoneresults - 2:20 pm on Feb 18, 2009 (gmt 0)

Liam, Welcome to WebmasterWorld! And thank you very much for taking the time to get involved, I personally wish to thank you.

I'm part of the Education and Outreach Working Group at the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. It's our job to make sure that these docs are easy to read, easy to use and explain things as clearly as possible. And to be incredibly pedantic about grammar and punctuation.

Tell the folks on your team that they did an excellent job with this new set of documents. You've totally paved the way for an official set of documents that we can reference when questions arise. Previously, it was a bit difficult to relay this information while digging deep through the W3 and other related resources. That is no longer the case, bravo!

External links count for more than on-page mark-up.

Heh! You just made a bunch of Webmaster's day, you really did. I'm going to let you slide with that comment for now. ;)

I wonder if you can put headings in these posts.

Now I know we're going to get along! I've been pushing for more semantics here at WebmasterWorld. They've been abused in the past so they were taken away. :(

I would avoid using headings for navigation on the whole. The headings should be about the specific content of the page, not the architecture of the site overall. Keep the navigation in an unordered list.

Ouch! That one is going to cause some stir. I do believe many of us have followed the long standing suggestions of placing menu items in lists and preceding them with headings if they are within a left/right navigation menu. Interesting that you would avoid headings in this instance as I see the assistive technologies rely on these to help define structure for the user. We'll definitely need to expand on this one. How would you precede a list of links that define a section? For example, you have 5 links in one section, 5 in another and 5 in another. They are three distinct sections that all have a root level Table of Contents and fall under a specific category. How would you label those lists?

Front-Loading

One of me favorite concepts in addition to IPW, SOC (Source Ordered Content), etc. You're one of the few people who have used that term here at WebmasterWorld. ;)

If anyone manages a good implementation, please let me know!

I believe the menu system that SuzyUK and I came up with years ago fits that bill.

N.b. - blimey, we could do with sprucing up the accessibility of webmasterworld, couldn't we. Ick.

Now I'm really starting to like you. Yes we could! Hey Brett, Adam, you hear that? ;)

POR, interesting question. In my experience the search performance of a site after accessibility improvements has always increased, and semantic structure is a major part of the improvements typically implemented.

That has been our experience also as far back as we can remember. This is not something new. Here's the one inherent challenge with this, it is very difficult if not impossible to pinpoint exactly which improvements were the cause of the effect. Our industry has this inherent need to find out which particular elements perform the best and then beat them to death. At the same time, all these other elements get zero fanfare around here, nada!

I just have to close with a big thanks to joining in the discussion. It is really a pleasure to have an individual who is directly involved with these documents to be providing feedback to us. That is way cool and ya'll just earned big brownie points on my side.

Between WebmasterWorld and the W3, there really are no other reference resources needed. We have everything we need right here.