Re: ISSUE-30 (Longdesc) Change Proposal

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 2:29 AM, Charles McCathieNevile
<chaals@opera.com> wrote:
>> The same can not be said for @longdesc ... Yes, there is
>> more than zero uptake, but I don't think there is enough to warrant
>> having duplicate (or near-duplicate) features.
>
> There is significant uptake in the ancillary materials - the books, courses,
> how-to pages and so on, that already use longdesc. Stripping it out doesn't
> always make us friends either.

I haven't read enough books or tutorials lately to know how much
@longdesc is mentioned.

However I'll note that clearly these books and tutorials haven't done
a very good evangelizing @longdesc, given how little it's apparently
used.

> Since it isn't that complicated (Opera recently implemented it, in trivial
> time, iCab has had it for ages as have screen readers that look for it on
> their own, there is a nice plugin for Mozilla)

I continue to think that "it has been implemented" only proves that
"it can be implemented", not that "it's a good idea to add to the web
platform". As a browser developer I'm always happy when i can simplify
my product, I would expect the same to be true for your engineering
and QA teams.

> and since it has a lot of
> supporting material already, we can take advantage of that fact to explain
> more of aria to authors.

Given how little @longdesc is used, I would be very hesitant to try to
explain any aspect of AIRA using "it's like longdesc", for feat that
it wouldn't be used more than @longdesc has.

> It is possible that we should deprecate longdesc -
> point out that it is obsolete, *if* aria-describedby can do the same job in
> the real world. But I don't think that day has yet arrived, and until it
> does, leaving an existing and well-described HTML feature that is useful
> (admittedly not to the whole universe, but to some people in some cases) in
> the spec seems a more rational choice.

Can you provide an example where @aria-describedby does not work as
well as @longdesc in the real world?

/ Jonas

Received on Thursday, 29 October 2009 22:02:45 UTC