I love it when standards evolve from something that a bunch of developers are already doing, and making it easier and foolproof. Kitty Giraudel is onto that here with skip links, something that every website should probably have, and that has a whole checklist of things that we can and do screw up:
- It should be the first thing to tab into.
- It should be hidden carefully so it remains focusable.
- When focused, it should become visible.
- Its content should start with “Skip” to be easily recognisable.
- It should lead to the main content of the page.
Doing this natively could solve all those problems and more (like displaying in the correct language for that user). Nice little project for someone to mock up as a browser extension, I’d say.
Reminds me of the idea of extending the Web Share API into native HTML. It’s just a good idea.
While I think this would be cool, I wonder what would happen if native skip links (like this just happens on any site) was actually implemented. All the sites that are doing the right thing already would presumably get double-ups. Potentially differently styled.
Google Search has this feature. Tabbing on the search page brings up a link that says “skip to main content”.
Yeah, that was kinda the point of the article — that could be migrated into being part of a browser instead.