aria-owns is complex

aria-owns seems to make a lot of simple things complex: Instead of  
examining simple parent-child DOM containment, implementations have to  
support arbitrary reparenting situations. It seems to me that this  
kind of open-ended complexity should be avoided if there are any ways  
to address the relevant use cases in a less general way.

I understand the rationale for having aria-owns is making hierarchical  
grid rows when HTML does not allow row nesting. Couldn't this case be  
addressed by aria-level on the <tr>s? Also, please compare with HTML5  
<datagrid>.

Moreover, making it possible for a parent to point to arbitrary  
children instead of allowing a child to associate itself with a single  
surrogate parent, aria-owns makes cycles possible in a structure that  
is supposed to be a tree. That can't be good for implementations.

Please consider solving the use cases aria-owns is designed to address  
in a way that doesn't cause arbitrary reparenting or cyclic data  
structures.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/