HTML5 Marking up content that repeats on related pages

Hi! The following was added to the UAWG wiki at http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/work/wiki/HTML5_review_by_UAWG_notes#Marking_up_content_that_repeats_on_related_pages:


    Marking up content that repeats on related pages

Added by Greg Lowney <http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/work/wiki/index.php?title=User:Glowney&action=edit&redlink=1> 09:11, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Can you mark up content that is repeated across pages on the site or subsite? For example, an example given in the HTML5 spec for the <footer> element describes it as showing a "site wide footer", but there is no easy way to distinguish that from a page-specific footer. This is particularly, but not exclusively, an issue for <header>, <footer>, and <nav> elements. This is an issue because assistive technology may often want to hide or skip over things that are repeated on multiple pages, but not skip over equivalents that are unique to the current page. Note that repeated content may still vary somewhat from page to page, as in when items in <nav> are all links except the one representing the current page, or the fact that different pages may have different copyright dates. One mechanism might be to allow an string attribute on these elements that could be compared to elements on other pages of the same site, and if the strings match the user agent can assume that they are 
equivalent (e.g. <nav sitewide="toplevel">).