Re: ARIA use in HTML other than for accessibility.

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 6:35 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@hsivonen.fi> wrote:

> On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 6:28 PM, Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com> wrote:
>
> >> > I appreciate that there are some in the HTML community who feel that
> the
> >> > use of values for @role should be constrained.
> >>
> >> It’s not just “some in the HTML community”—it’s the as-defined HTML
> >> language which is making those constraints, as documented in the HTML
> >> spec.
> >
> >
> > I know.  And I also know it was a vocal few who made this happen, and
> that
> > the PFWG rolled over and agreed because they had little choice.  That
> > doesn't make it right.  It just makes it the status quo.
>
> The PFWG is supposed to work on accessibility and not Semantics.
>
> As for "making it right", the W3C closed down the XHTML2 Working
> Group. I think this should be taken as a rejection of the vision of
> the XHTML2 Working Group, including for the role attribute and RDFa,
> instead rehashing the same ideas over and over in other working
> groups, such as the HTML WG or the PFWG.
>

Actually, no.  When the XHTML2 Working Group was closed, the Role Attribute
and RDFa were both handed off to other activities where they were
completed.  I am pretty sure RDFa was split off even before the whole
HTML5/XHTML2 nonsense went down.  Regardless, those specs were completed
and are not in active use.  Yay!


>
> I agree with Steve and Mike that there is value in not confusing the
> purpose of the role attribute with non-accessibility scope creep. It's
> already hard enough to get Web authors to use ARIA correctly when the
> syntax is not overloaded with other concerns. I think ARIA doesn't
> need to be strictly restricted to communicating with assistive
> technologies that are logically separate from the browser itself--I
> think it's OK to implement e.g. "go to [landmark]" functionality by
> other means also, such as keyboard shortcuts or visual browser chrome.
>

I maintain that there is no confusion.  @role has been and continues to be
about semantics.  Those semantics inform *interpretation* and *behavior*.
That's *exactly* what it was supposed to have done.  Everyone wins.

P.S.  YAGNI?  Really?  While you might not need it, I bet search engines do
(cough schema.org cough).  Or content aggregators.  Or knowledge engines.

-- 
Shane McCarron
Managing Director, Applied Testing and Technology, Inc.