Navigation misuses right-pointing carets

[agreiner]

Describe the issue
Menus misuse the right-pointing caret as a bullet for navigation items. A rightward pointing caret usually indicates an expandable (accordion) menu item rather than a link with a page transition.

URL
Navigation on https://beta.w3.org.

Recommended solution
Use a graphic element that doesn't set user expectation that differs from the element's behavior.

Additional context
Add any other context about the problem here.

[xfq]

What about vertical lines? Like the ones on https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS

[agreiner]

Yes, I think vertical lines are a reasonable choice.

[simonrjones]

hi there (designers of the Beta site here!).

This feels a bit of a matter of opinion rather than a bug, but I agree the right-pointing caret is commonly used to expand menu items. I can't find any UX references on this specifically, however, other past websites we've designed have done exactly what you say (right-pointing caret to expand, no caret when it's just a link). See the menu on https://www.hs2.org.uk/

If W3C would like to see this change, rather than trying to replace the right-pointing caret with something else we'd recommend simply removing the arrows. However, this would remove the visual cue that these items are links, so it may be necessary to add something.

See example:

[koalie]

I concur it’s probably a matter of opinion.
for me, what suggest that something has anything to expand is appending “…”
I consider the caret to represent some hierarchy, like we do in the breadcrumbs.
I actually like that ">" prepends a link/menu because it points to it visually like an arrow.

I propose to leave it like this for now, I added a label "UX feedback" and let's await further feedback during the Beta site testing.