RE: Candidate TF Resolution: ISSUE-30 longdesc

Ian Hickson wrote:
> 
> >    RESOLUTION: Group agrees that we should have out of page
> > descriptions, but has concerns about its implementation.
> 
> Ok...
> 
> >    RESOLUTION: The group wants longdesc to continue in HTML 5.
> 
> This seems like a non-sequitur. What's the rationale for this position?
> It doesn't seem to follow from the previous ones.

No alternative mechanism has been presented to link to out-of-page
descriptions outside of the suggestion that the link be visible on the
page - a solution previously tried and rejected by the mainstream author
community years ago: (see: d-link
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/), as well as 'in the wild' source
code for CSSquirrel as an example for the need for external only text:
http://www.cssquirrel.com/comic/?comic=58 |
http://www.cssquirrel.com/comicscripts/script58.htm demonstrating a
continued need for text that remain outside of the main container page
(here, Kyle does not want to duplicate the content of his comic as plain
text on the same page - a creative right of the artist that we
cannot/should not be removing). 

I do not believe that the 'solution' that Kyle is implementing to do the
'right thing' is scalable as it imposes a number of additional hoops for
the content author - leaving others to often not bother doing either as it
is too 'complex' - this is an authors over implementers scenario.


> 
> >    RESOLUTION: The group does NOT want longdesc to continue
indefinitely
> > in future versions of HTML, although some people objected to this
> > decision.
> 
> Why would we want to drop it in a future version but not this version?
> It would be helpful to make clear the criteria under which we would
> consider longdesc="" suitable for removal.

If/when aria-described by supports URLs as well as IDREFs then the
criteria for deprecating @longdesc would be met. There is discussion that
this might happen in ARIA 2.0, but given that ARIA 1.0 is now closed to
further comments (Deadline was Feb. 2, 2010) we will likely not see this
in ARIA 1.0. This is covered in the Draft Resolution, but omitted in your
response:

   RESOLUTION: We do not want to change aria-describedby to support
descriptions in a separate page in the ARIA 1.0 time frame.

   RESOLUTION: aria-describedby should be enhanced in the ARIA 2.0 time
frame to support external descriptions (out of page).


JF

Received on Tuesday, 13 April 2010 21:28:21 UTC