Can I have a nav element with no links in it?

Question

<nav> typically has <a> elements inside it, but is it required? I have a radio button form whose purpose is akin to navigation. It doesn't navigate to other pages on the Internet, but instead changes the visibility of elements within the body of the HTML document (like a carousel).

Thanks! I've been wrestling with semantic markup tonight!

Answer 1

tl;dr: No, the nav element requires links (but not necessarily a elements).

W3C’s HTML5 defines the nav element like this:

The nav element represents a section of a page that links to other pages or to parts within the page: a section with navigation links.

By default, a radio button doesn’t link to a part within the page. In your case, it changes the visibility of an element on the page. So it’s not appropriate to use the nav element for this purpose (unless, maybe, changing the radio button focuses the changed element; but that behaviour might be bad for usability).

Answer 2

The whole point of semantics, is that when viewed in an entirely different light, it's still readily clear in how to derive meaning and relational context from the content.

A web browser will parse your HTML out of the Dom after every load or change, and construct an opinion based on that about the content. The browser will keep this handy to itself internally in case it needs it later to assist it with difficult judgement calls should it be asked to perform a seemingly complex operation.

For example, someone who has really poor eyesight might enable an accessibility feature on their mobile device that tacks on a variety of different visual styles adding a great deal of visual emphasis to interactible elements they can touch, depending on the type of interaction. This could be something like a bright color coated and outlined overlay on top of elements, perhaps something like cyan for multimedia controls, yellow for form elements, and magenta for navigation points. This feature would have to work on any and all possible content which the browser will ever render, and so what you've got is a hidden under the hood runtime script that the browser is using to dynamically parse what ever it's loaded in order to construct some sort of opinion which it can lean on exorcise what will hopefully be good judgement. So no matter how clear your navigation might seem visually to someone with great eyesight, this is why semantics are such a big deal and why it's so important we continue to make efforts to use them correctly, as here you have a machine alternatively parsing your source code because it has zero comprehension of it's otherwise visual context.

When it comes to accessibility, browsers are much more complex in forming their opinions than just simply parsing the Dom. In a scenario such as this example, and the code you're wanting to write, wrapping your navigation elements in a nav tag should properly assist the browser into making the right call. Even if they're not link tags, the browser is going to take note of any elements inside of a nav tag witch active event listener handles items like click and similar.

As another user mentioned, semantics is all about judgement. There are countless other ways which good semantics play a role into good development, dry code and easier maintainability being my two favorites. There are no hard lines for "can do" and "can't do", but practicing good semantics is still pretty easy to do regardless. Just continually ask yourself these couple of questions about your core content-

• If someone or something tried to use this in ways which I'm not explicitly building in targeted functionality for, do I think it will be able to understand what content is what and the associated intents well enough to be successful at what ever is being attempted?

• If I was to refactor or repurpose any of this later, is there a clear separation of content, logic, and style? Is my content clean, and meaningfully distinguished? Is it so clean and ready, that I can just rip it out and drop it into something new with little or no change? Essentially, how portable is this content? Is it plug and play level portable? And if not, could it be made more portable with better semantics?

Practice developing with proper semantics using those couple of core guidelines, and you'll almost always be perfectly fine.

Just to make sure I've directly addressed your question- Yes. What you've done is "okay", and "semantically legal" 🙂