- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:57:31 -0700
- To: Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com>
- Cc: Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>, HTMLWG WG <public-html@w3.org>
On Apr 1, 2010, at 9:22 AM, Shelley Powers wrote: > On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 9:39 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> > wrote: >> >> On Apr 1, 2010, at 8:00 AM, Steven Faulkner wrote: >> >>> Hi all, >>> i agree that it is better for accessibility to have native controls >>> as the properties of these controls can be hooked up to >>> accessibility >>> APIs by the browser. >> >> This point is worth noting. Appropriate semantic markup for >> application >> controls does not mean extra work has to be done by a screen reader >> or other >> assistive technology, as Shelley suggested. Rather, the browser >> engine >> directly exposes such controls to the appropriate accessibility >> API, and the >> screen reader at the other end doesn't even have to know if it's a >> real >> control or ARIA. >> > > That's all well and good, but it's still a bad design choice. > > How many declarative elements will we have in the future. Dozens? > Hundreds? How many versions of HTML we'll we have to have, because we > have to roll out new versions for a bunch of widgets that could be > created with JavaScript and CSS? If we wanted to have declarative elements for every reasonable control that a Web App? Well, Interface Builder for Mac OS X offers about 35 distinct controls. I would say that is more than enough for any reasonable application, at least at the current state of the art. I think this is a useful point of comparison because Cocoa is widely believed to be a usable and comprehensive UI toolkit. Note: that's combining ones that would be the same semantic element in HTML, but with different styles, and omitting controls that are solely there to control layout. Of these, I see about 4 that are not adequately covered by an HTML5 element or <input> type, yet general-purpose enough that they could possibly make sense to add. The most notable omission is table / outline. This would have been handled by <datagrid>, but <datagrid> didn't make the cut for HTML5. (Later if I get a chance, I'll compare to the set of controls offered by Cocoa Touch). Regards, Maciej
Received on Thursday, 1 April 2010 16:58:05 UTC