Can the HTML5 <nav> element be used to group links that filter or reorder main content?

Question

Our site has two primary navigation links to two completely different pages. Something like this:

<section>
    <header>
        <nav>
            <ul>
                <li><a href="link1.html">Link 1</a></li>
                <li><a href="link2.html">Link 2</a></li>
            </ul>
        </nav>
    </header>
</section>

On one of the pages, we also have a filtering component made up of a list of links that uses Ajax to change the result set listed in the main content area (similar to how kayak.com filters their flight options in real time as you adjust sliders, click checkboxes, etc.)

My question is, should that group of filtering links be wrapped in a <nav> element?

It would look like this:

<section>
    <nav>
        <ul>
            <li><a href="#filter1">Filter 1</a></li>
            <li><a href="#filter2">Filter 2</a></li>
            <li><a href="#filter3">Filter 3</a></li>
            <li><a href="#filter4">Filter 4</a></li>
            <li><a href="#filter5">Filter 5</a></li>
        </ul>
    </nav>
</section>

The reason for my confusion is that the spec is not clear as to whether materially changing the content of the page via a method such as filtering constitutes "primary navigation". Also, I'm not sure if having two nav elements on the page like this would be semantically confusing from an accessibility standpoint.

Answer 1

You could, but it's not semantically correct. I'd go for a command tag here, because you're not navigating the content, you're giving the command to show/hide certain content based on some criteria.