aria-describedby vs longdesc [was: Re: Opera 10.10 recently added longdesc support]

Laura L. Carlson wrote:

> (NOTE: it is understood that aria-describedby cannot point off page directly.)

Ouch.  Is it too late to allow URLs in place of IDREFs?  (IDREFs could
of course still be done as #fragments.)

Or, at the very least, could the link suggestion be explicitly added
-- that aria itself would say that if the target ID is a link, then
the description is in the target of the link, rather than its
contents?

(HTML5 could probably do this by itself if it needs to ... but this
seems like something that ought to be fixed at the source level -- in
this case, the aria spec.)

-jJ