Re: text role removal

> On Jun 22, 2016, at 4:44 AM, James Craig <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Jun 20, 2016, at 1:01 PM, Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com> wrote:
>> 
>> From what I remember, this was removed due to the inability to handle the scenario of author error when role="text" were applied to the body tag of a webpage, which would destroy all child contents. This came up during one of the UAIG calls.
> 
> We addressed this point prior to it's inclusion in the spec, and even included some serious author warnings.
> 
> The resolution of that discussion was that the benefits of tools used correctly outweigh the risks of their potential misuse. In other words, the occasional smashed finger doesn't negate the usefulness of a hammer.	


After re-reading the discussion on this topic, there wasn't enough in the meeting minutes to warrant its removal.
http://www.w3.org/2016/03/31-aria-minutes.html#item04

The feature was already approved for 1.1 (in the January 2014 F2F meeting), it was one of the first features added to the spec (along with appropriate warning text), and already had two shipping implementations at the time of its removal. 

Given all that, the only thing warranting its removal would be:

1) An agreement that the feature is not, in fact, useful. (effectively like deprecation)
2) A formal statement from one of the browsers vendors that the feature is not implementable on a particular platform.

The text role should be uncommented and moved back into the spec. (ACTION-2086)

James

Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2016 12:07:01 UTC