Re: ISSUE-95 hidden - Chairs Solicit Proposals

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 12:21 AM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> The spec originally used "irrelevant" (with inspiration from XForms) but
> overwhelming feedback indicated that "hidden" was better, both in terms of
> ease of use, and in terms of people getting the general intent of the
> attribute. Despite the occasional confusion, people seem to misunderstand
> hidden="" far more rarely than they did irrelevant="".

That was my recollection.  Would they perhaps misunderstand ignored=""
or ignore="" or something else still less, though?

> If anyone has any suggestions of examples or anti-examples that could be
> added to the spec to illustrate the correct interpretation of the
> attribute, please feel free to file bugs. I'd be happy to elaborate on the
> text in the spec, I just lack inspiration for how to do it in an effective
> way. (It's easy to come up with examples that confuse more than help.)

I don't know if the spec is too unclear, but almost no authors will
read the spec.  If a hidden element disappears in visual UAs and an
author doesn't bother testing in non-visual UAs -- or maybe only tests
in non-visual UAs that happen not to support it -- they could draw
incorrect conclusions based on the name.  If no one's implemented the
attribute yet, maybe we could still improve the name.

Received on Sunday, 17 January 2010 11:58:28 UTC