Find a Better Name for "skip-navigation" Class

My bet is to focus on the thing you'll get by following such a link, not the thing you're trying to bypass.

@yoroy, I appreciate the advice, but I'm confused. You were just complaining about my having brought up usability under another item in the issue queue. By moving this discussion here, I'm yielding to @mgifford's request that we not have this discussion there. The way I see it, he's doing the heavy work on this item, so it's important to respect his wishes. He doesn't want us to tie up his time having to check posts that are only about hashing out what words he uses for this class name. For those who are interested in both this discussion and the coding aspects of this issue, just as I linked to the item in the issue queue from this discussion, I linked to this discussion from that item. So those folks can easily find both discussions, and Mike and anyone else who needs to focus on the coding doesn't have to waste valuable minutes finding out that the last umpteen comments for the issue all had to do with the name of this class.

@markus_petrux, if we were talking about terms that would appear in the link text, I would agree: Identify the destination, not the stuff you're avoiding. But for this class name the problem with identifying the thing you'll get is that it varies. In fact, it's conceivable that links that use this class will take you around content to get to navigation — or around content to get to a form. The destination depends on how the themer has built the theme and how the developer has built the page. (The same situation makes it difficult to specify what you're avoiding.)

That said, almost always this element will be used to bypass content that is repeated on similar pages. Usually that would be navigation. Sometimes it might be a toolbar. It might also be one or more blocks in the Drupalese sense of the term. Isn't "chrome" used to refer to that kind of stuff — the stuff that stays (mostly) the same page to page and frames the part that changes?

So how about "bypass-chrome"?

Just caught up on the debate in the issue queue re: "bypass" v. "skip." Not only have I always heard these referred to as "skip links" and have never, ever heard "bypass block," the very pages cited as guidelines for this feature consistently say "skip links" or "skip navigation":

http://www.webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist#sc2.4.1
http://www.webaim.org/techniques/skipnav/

The latter is an especially clear example. The word "bypass" only appears twice on the page (once as "bypassing"), and every example of actual implementation uses the term "skip."

I say we stick with "skip links." It makes intuitive sense, is in wide use, and is the terminology used by the guideline authors.

Lately, I've been re-thinking skip links as page links. Instead of skipping to the content or skipping to the navigation, these links point to the most common destinations on the page.

For example, I used to have:

<ul class="skip-links">
  <li><a href="#">Skip to main content</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">Skip to navigation</a></li>
</ul>

And now I use:

<ul class="page-links">
  <li><a href="#">Main Content</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">Site Navigation</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">Search</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">Login</a></li>
</ul>

These links are still hidden for most visitors, but screen readers and mobile users now have more meaningful links to what their looking for on the page.

I come to this issue linguistically. "Skip-nav" is the term now used. It's not perfect, but it's not so bad -- it's unique, hard to confuse with any other concept, and most of all, it has spread throughout the accessibility community and its resources. If you change it completely, many people will not know what you mean, will wonder why you changed the term and if that change implies some new concept (which it doesn't). Think of the hundreds of times someone will say "What the heck is [new term]?" "Oh", comes the reply, "that's what the Drupal folks call skip-nav." And the thousands of times there will be no reply.