Re: ISSUE 30 @longdesc use cases

Ian Hickson writes:

> hidden="" is defined as flagging irrelevant data because there
> previously was no way to do this, but it is common practice to have
> content in Web pages that is not relevant. For example, a Web app
> might have a login page and an application page as distinct <section>s
> of the same HTML file. There was no way, prior to hidden="", to
> initially hide the application page (which is useless until the user
> is logged in). Authors used display:none to fake this, but that has
> poor accessibility results; for example, it means any user agent
> without CSS support would see the content that was intended to be
> hidden.

Or they only put the content that was relevant initially in the HTML,
then use JavaScript to add and remove elements to and from the dom as
the situation changed. That's quite tedious, because it means a
significant portion of the page can't be declared straightforwardly with
HTML but has to be rewritten as JavaScript that creates the HTML. The
hidden attribute will make things much simpler, allowing all HTML to be
written as HTML.

Smylers

Received on Tuesday, 24 August 2010 09:26:01 UTC