Re: Moving longdesc forward

On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Richard Schwerdtfeger <schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:

> I would add text that when the long description dialog is closed that the
> user agent return the user's point of regard to the element within the
> document where the user left off.

Can you elaborate about what you're worried about here and why?

Do we have reason to think implementations are likely to return users
elsewhere?

Can we express this in terms of an abstract user story rather than a
description that assumes a particular UI (such as opening a dialog)?

If a longdesc replaces the current browsing context, this appears to be covered
by the history traversal algorithm, specifically Step 9: "If the entry is an
entry with persisted user state, the user agent may update aspects of the
document and its rendering, for instance the scroll position or values of form
fields, that it had previously recorded."

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/history.html#traverse-the-history

Opening a new browsing context does not normally alter the existing browsing
context. I'd expect the same to be true of opening some sort of dialog.

In the case of replacing an image with a long description, what is expected is
the ability to swap the long description view back for the image view, in which
case language about returning to the element isn't quite right, as the user
never leaves the element, instead a different resource is transcluded
(@longdesc not @src).

> "are expected" is not particularly normative text. Should this be musts?

I do not think the HTML5 specification should mandate any particular
UI, so I do not
think so.

Please note the entire rendering section of the spec is informative
not normative.
Our use of "are expected" here is in line with the other suggestions
in that section.

However, the proposed text for <img> does include this normative text:

"User agents should allow users to access long text alternatives."

I wouldn't have suggested that text were it not that the spec for @cite
contains a similar SHOULD-level conformance point: "User agents should allow
users to follow such citation links."

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Tuesday, 3 May 2011 23:21:35 UTC