RE: XHTML 2 Role Tag

OK. Summary Will, no interest in spatial relationship.

Quoting Jason.

 On the Web I run Lynx or Emacs/W3 and, in the latter, set it up to linearize everything. As a result I lose all of the spatial relationships and I don't regard this as a significant loss.

Sometimes it is important to navigate through tables (meaning genuine data tables, not tables used for layout) cell by cell, across the rows or down the columns. I suppose that could be called "spatial" although it is more taking advantage of the table structure. Layout tables can just be linearized and things almost always turn out in a reasonable order. In fact I never knew tables were used for layout until it was mentioned in an accessibility seminar in the mid 90's. I had been using Lynx over a telnet connection to a Solaris machine to access the Web, and the whole issue of layout tables as an accessibility problem simply didn't arise in that environment.

The only context I can think of where spatial relationships might have mattered is with form controls and their labels, if the author hasn't used the LABEL element. Even there, the point is that the label occurs immediately before or after the control, and whether it is to the left, to the right, or above really doesn't matter - in fact it can create confusion as one then has to determine whether the label for the control is the one that precedes it or the one that follows, and if the LABEL element isn't used one has to judge this from context.

dp. It educated me too. 

hth DaveP.

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Received on Friday, 12 November 2004 09:04:51 UTC