Re: proposal: subline element

Steve Faulkner, Wed, 29 May 2013 12:16:32 +0100:
> some people in the HTML community have indicated their interest in a
> feature that provides a semantic indication of  a subheading,
> subtitle, alternative title or tagline
> 
> here is a feature proposal to further discussion:
> 
> http://rawgithub.com/w3c/subline/master/index.html


2 issues:

1) The proposal says that AT may convey the semantic as a - well - 
“subline”. But what if there is a non-subline element, like a <p>, 
between the heading and the subline? Will the AT then announce it as a 
subline of that paragraph? I mean, if all the AT is going to say is 
"subline", then the user will at least get the impression that it is a 
subline of the previous paragraph. (Note that proposal’s rule that 
subline ”is associated with the first preceding heading element” does 
not contradict there being a paragraph between the subline and the 
preceding heading.) Hgroup does would not have this issue.

2) You have turned into an feature that *only* has effect for AT users. 
At least there is no CSS effects or other non-philosophic, non-AT 
advantages, that I can see. By contrast, h1-h6 offer well known styling 
effects for sighted users too. Even <small> has an advantage in that 
regard. I would at least suggest that you should define CSS effects. 
For instance, if a subline next to a h1 ought to have the same styling 
(e.g. same font size) as an h2 element, then one could do this:

  h1+subline,
  h1+subline+subline{font-size:1.59em;}

And if subline next to h2 should have same size as h3, then:

  h2+subline,
  h2+subline+subline{font-size:1.17em;}

(See http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/rendering.html#sections-and-headings )

Such styling would also have the effect that it would cause authors to 
place the subline at the right location (adjacent to the heading 
element), and thus help avoid the problem I described under 1). 
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Thursday, 30 May 2013 03:05:54 UTC