Ordering navigation code and content code

[Wolfgang Meier]

fup2 c.i.w.a.site-design

Hi,

What do you think: Is it better to put code describing navigational
elements to the top or to the bottom of content?

Don't get me wrong - I'm not talking about whether to render
navigational elements near the top of the page but merely where to
place the code in the .html file.

One problem with placing navigation at the start of HTML code arises
with machine-generated excerpts, as found in Web Directories and Search
Engine results: Content is often extracted from the top of the page
which would be navigational elements.

When placing navigation at the end of HTML code, however, users
perceiving a "accessible", i.e. as coded, layout of the page would have
to repeatedly skip to the end of intermediate pages to navigate to the
page they want to retrieve.
What do you think?

Regards,

Wolf