Re: Is the current definition of the article element in HTML useful?

Hi robin,

The primary method of conveying the role of an element to screen
reader users is to prefix and sometimes suffix the element content
with the name of the element or some brief description of the elements
role.

So in this sense the use of article to describe a one sentence comment
and a lengthy blog post seem at odds.
One can also imageine that hearing article/article end many times over
would jack people off as indicated by users when asked.

"Unlabeled regions created by <section> and <article> elements are
annoying especially as they appear in the region nav order. " [1]

where pages have many comments and article is used:

"Chipping in from an AT user's perspective... That many <article> on a
page is a UX nightmare."


[1] https://twitter.com/mixolydian/status/289113271343140864
[2] https://twitter.com/LeonieWatson/status/290926240704102401

On 23 January 2013 12:27, Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org> wrote:
> On 23/01/2013 13:17 , Steve Faulkner wrote:
>>>
>>> Concerning exposing the semantic differences between the two, why
>>> not handle that with RDFa/Microdata? See http://schema.org/Comment
>>> and >http://schema.org/Article? Or perhaps more appropriately for
>>> this specific usage http://schema.org/BlogPosting and
>>> http://schema.org/UserComments?
>>
>>
>> I am skeptical of the practicality asking user agents to modify the
>> semantics based on rdf/microdata or ask developers to add it to
>> provide info to the accessibility layer.
>
>
> Right, I figured that might be the issue — but you didn't say :)
>
> One thing that would be helpful here would be to understand a11y use case
> for providing a strong distinction between the two. I'm guessing navigating
> to the useful parts of the document and skipping the inanity, but I'm no
> expert.
>
> One thing that I find annoying with comments is that they tend to be
> available by default, which lengthens the page. In turn, I tend to base
> decisions to read now or later on the size of the scrolling widget — which
> is then thrown off.
>
> I wonder if recommending to mark comments up as <article> inside <details>
> would address the sort of issue you had in mind.
>
>
> --
> Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Wednesday, 23 January 2013 13:27:34 UTC