DPUB-ARIA revision update

Hi folks,

 

As you may be aware, we're looking to publish a minor update to the
DPUB-ARIA role module through the ARIA working group. The editor's draft of
the document[1] now incorporates all of the expected changes (minus a
possible inclusion of roles for running headers and footers[2]).

 

A list of substantive changes is provided in the document,[3] but the most
significant change we wanted to make sure publishers are aware of is the
deprecating of the doc-endnote[4] and doc-biblioentry[5] roles.
Unfortunately, when we created these roles, we understood that they could
inherit list semantics from the HTML ol or ul elements or the ARIA list
role. A subsequent clarification of the role model has made this impossible,
so we were faced with either deprecating the roles or creating new list
roles for each that would then have to be applied all the time (i.e., even
on ol and ul).

 

The rationale for deprecating the roles is that the parent sections already
make clear what they contain (i.e., a bibliography contains bibliography
entries and similarly an endnotes section will contain endnotes). In the
case of endnotes, deprecating arguably makes it clearer that doc-footnote
can be used in all cases - the contents of the list items in the endnotes
section can be identified as shown in the specification example.[6]

 

Deprecating these roles will also match the output of the Ace tool, which
has rejected these roles as children of a list, contrary to the less strict
interpretation in epubcheck. We're hoping that the awareness of this issue
by Ace users will reduce the real-world impact of their deprecation. It will
also allow us to harmonize validation between the two now that the conflict
is resolved.

 

We encourage you to review the updates and if you have any concerns or
comments you'd like to make, please open issues in the GitHub tracker.[7]

 

[1] https://w3c.github.io/dpub-aria/

[2] https://github.com/w3c/dpub-aria/issues/10

[3] https://w3c.github.io/dpub-aria/#changelog

[4] https://w3c.github.io/dpub-aria/#doc-endnote

[5] https://w3c.github.io/dpub-aria/#doc-biblioentry

[6] https://w3c.github.io/dpub-aria/#example-15

[7] https://github.com/w3c/dpub-aria/issues

 

Matt