Question about the new/proposed "tbody" role for tables

Hi all.

As you know, right now we have a generic "rowgroup" role, along with a
note [1] that states:

    Note: This role does not differentiate between types of row groups
    (e.g., thead vs. tbody), but an issue has been raised for WAI-ARIA
    2.0.

Given that we're creating the new non-interactive table roles for 1.1, I
think we can/should address the above now, creating ARIA roles thead,
tfoot, and tbody. If you don't agree with this, please tell me now. :)

If you do agree these roles should be created: My plan was to make
thead, tfoot, and tbody subclasses of the current rowgroup role. An ARIA
table or grid could have at most one ARIA thead and one ARIA tfoot, just
like in HTML. The question is what about ARIA tbody?

HTML lets you have multiple tbody elements, so we could do that as well.
However, HTML also prescribes exactly where these tbody elements can be
placed. ARIA, on the other hand has aria-owns. I think a non-interactive
ARIA table which can have an unspecified number of ARIA tbody instances
that can be scattered throughout the DOM thanks to aria-owns is asking
for trouble.

The solutions that spring to my mind are:

1. You can have at most one ARIA tbody, but can then further delineate
   the rows in that tbody into ARIA rowgroups.

2. You can have as many ARIA tbody instances as you want, just like
   HTML. But then you cannot use aria-owns to place them outside of
   the parent ARIA table or grid.

My personal preference at the moment is for option 1. But it's not a
strong preference. Whatever works for authors and user agents and in the
end is accessible via the accessible table interface is fine by me.

Mind you, if everyone thinks it's no problem to have however many tbody
instances you want, and put them wherever in the DOM you want, and the
accessible table interface implementation for that table will work as
expected for each platform.... I'm skeptical, but ok. :)

Lemme know. Thanks!
--joanie

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/roles#rowgroup

Received on Wednesday, 1 April 2015 02:20:39 UTC