- From: Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>
- Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:33:48 +0100
- To: HTMLwg <public-html@w3.org>
Tab Atkins Jr., Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:37:50 -0600: >> OK. Hopefully HTML4 replace their functionality with better things. >> That is not the case w.r.t. <area>. > > What functionality is lost? Is this useful functionality? If it > serves a valuable use-case, then it shouldn't be dropped. Can you > express such a use-case? The problem with attributes versus elements is that attributes are subject to data rot. The <area> element requires use of an @alt attribute, whose content should be synced with a map. Whereas for <a> it is expected that there is content inside the element. Thus accessibility fallback is not required. Simpler. Less prone to data rot. Simpler to keep in sync. Accessibility more or less automatically taken care of. Elements simply has better accessibility than attributes. It would be interesting to see some statistics of how much the alt attribute of <area> is used ... HTML4 has an example[1] of something that is not possible with <area>: links that works both inside and outside the image map. If there is a workaround, then it is at least not explained in the spec.). Even less to keep in sync! Less data rot. I reworked the HTML4 example slightly and tried in Live DOM viewer. Works in released versions of Opera and Firefox. [2] With the wide support Firefox and Opera has today, this means that it has never been better support for this feature. ;-) [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects#h-13.6.1.1 [2] http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/saved/386 -- leif halvard silli
Received on Thursday, 25 February 2010 07:34:24 UTC