Re: ARIA use in HTML other than for accessibility.

On 04/05/2015 17:08, Shane McCarron wrote:

> But here's a corollary:  Role use in HTML makes sense when it results in
> concrete improvements in the consumer experience.  Any time I can inform
> a consumer about the purpose of something in a way that is semantically
> meaningful, that's a win.  Isn't it convenient that there is such
> serendipity between these two concepts?  I use @role values to signal
> information to the WAI-ARIA implementation in the UA and in the AT.  I
> *also* can use @role values to tell the UA things that have nothing to
> do with WAI-ARIA per se, but have everything to do with making
> information about my content available.  @role="glossary", if the term
> "glossary" were well defined, would tell a document processor where my
> glossary was.  An aggregator could pull together all of the glossaries
> from all over the place and make the terms and references available in
> ways you or I have not yet imagined.  If that value *also* happens to be
> a WAI-ARIA value that is known to the UA, and has a parent of "region"
> and various other attributes, it could improve the user experience too!

The one danger I can see here is that if role gets extended to allow an 
almost arbitrary number of values, and those values are not very clearly 
defined,  it'll be no different from using, say, classnames to attempt 
to define semantics (a la microformats) - and if a specific vocabulary 
is not enforced, and authors can potentially extend role arbitrarily, 
then we'll simply see a wealth of custom-use values that will be 
completely non-interoperable.

P
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Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Monday, 4 May 2015 16:21:17 UTC