Re: <input type=search> and role=search

Interesting. Other than having the semantic type of 'search' (and
benefits outlined here), does it function pretty much like a text
input? How does it differ?



On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 7:09 PM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
>
>  The WAI-ARIA draft has a landmark role 'search':
>  http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/#search
>
>  Safari implements <input type=search> which gives the right widget on
>  Mac OS X and is already used on top sites apple.com and facebook.com.
>
>  I think <input type=search> is preferable over role=search because
>  getting the right visual widget gives designers an incentive to flag
>  the search field as a search field without having to do an
>  afterthought accessibility annotation pass. Thus, with <input
>  type=search> the accessibility landmark comes 'for free' from the
>  author point of view.
>
>  <input type=search> has excellent fallback behavior. In browsers that
>  don't know about <input type=search>, it degrades gracefully to <input
>  type=text>.
>
>  I suggest adopting <input type=search> in HTML and, thus, removing the
>  need for an accessibility-specific annotation for search.
>
>  --
>  Henri Sivonen
>  hsivonen@iki.fi
>  http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
>
>
>
>