Re: Opera 10.10 recently added longdesc support

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:28 AM, Charles McCathieNevile
<chaals@opera.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:50:36 +0200, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Laura Carlson
>> <laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Aryeh
>>>
>>> You wrote [1]:
>>>
>>>> as far as I
>>>> know, longdesc is so consistently misused that no user agent, AT or
>>>> otherwise, bothers providing it to users in any obvious way by
>>>> default.
>>>
>>> Opera 10.10 recently added longdesc support
>>> http://www.iheni.com/londesc-support-opera-1010/
>>
>> Meanwhile, Firefox 3.6 is removing support for it [1]. I added support
>> for it a long time ago in [2], in fact, it was one of my first patches
>> as a Mozilla contributor. However it was deemed too much code
>> (literally thousands of lines of code) for too little gain. In these
>> cases we generally advice the use of an extension instead, which seems
>> like it's going to happen here [3].
>
> This illustrates a few important things. For us it wasn't thousands of lines
> of code, but a quick fix (and one we expect to mostly re-use for
> aria-describedBy, as well as giving us experience of using that in the
> browser itself). So clearly extrapolating from teh experience of either
> Firefox or Opera doesn't apply to other people's code.

I should note that the firefox code removed did a lot more than
support @longdesc. It would definitely take a lot less code to *just*
support @longdesc.

/ Jonas

Received on Tuesday, 15 September 2009 19:03:33 UTC