[Sigia-l] right hand nav

[Simon Willison]

At 16:13 16/07/2002 +0100, gMeta wrote:
>o search engine spiders and
>o visually impared screen readers...
>
>...to dig through left hand navs [LHNs] as they try to
>dig out the content on each page.
>
>a RHN avoids this and provides the content
>- which is of prime importance - first.

True, but in practise it is relatively easy to have the navigation on the 
left hand side while keeping the HTML for the content "first" in the source 
code, thus staying accessible and search engine friendly. You can do this 
either with a table rowspan trick or by switching to using pure CSS for 
your page layout (which is rapidly becoming a valid option now that the 
population of NS4 users is dwindling towards zero). Information on both of 
these techniques can be found here:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/06/21.html#day_10_presenting_your_main_content_first

Personally I'm a fan of main-site-navigation-aross -the-top and 
individual-section-navigation-down-the-left, but I can't back that up with 
any analysis - it's just a personal preference.

Regards,

Simon Willison
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/