Re: make aria-owns to rearrange children

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 9:09 AM, James Nurthen <james.nurthen@oracle.com>
wrote:

>  One issue with aria-owns is that as soon as you start to use it you end
> up with a massive number of idrefs.
>

We discussed this problem a while back in the context of web components,
and there were at least two possible solutions I thought could work:

* Expose reflected attributes on an Element, allowing for example:
parent.ariaOwns = [child3, child2, child1]; or parent.ariaActiveDescendant
= child2;
* Alllow a querySelector string in place of an idref, for example <tr
aria-owns="query(.leftcells .rightcells)"> or <div
aria-activedescendant="query([tabIndex='0'])">.

Are you still interested in pursuing either of those, or even both? I might
like to try implementing one of those behind a flag if the group can come
to a tentative consensus.

FWIW, I like Alexander's idea of allowing aria-owns for sibling
relationships. I think we should do it either way, and then solve the IDREF
problem in general.

- Dominic


> Something I would like to be able to do is reference a parent node (with
> role=presentation) in aria-owns with the effect that its children would be
> owned.
> One place we hit this a lot is in grids with multiple scrollable regions.
> So, currently, in the following 2 rows table with 2 scrollable regions, we
> have the following structure.
>
> <tr role="row" aria-owns="r1c1 r1c2 r1c3 r1c4 r1c5 r1c6">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r1c1">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r1c2">
> </tr>
> <tr role="row" aria-owns="r2c1 r2c2 r2c3 r2c4 r2c5 r2c6">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r2c1">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r2c2">
> </tr>
> <tr role="presentation">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r1c3">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r1c4">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r1c5">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r1c6">
> </tr>
> <tr role="presentation">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r2c3">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r2c4">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r2c5">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r2c6">
> </tr>
>
> What I would like to be able to (which I would like to have the same
> result in the API mapping) is the following
>
> <tr role="row" aria-owns="r1c1 r1c2 r1">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r1c1">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r1c2">
> </tr>
> <tr role="row" aria-owns="r2c1 r2c2 r2">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r2c1">
>   <td role="gridcell" id="r2c2">
> </tr>
> <tr role="presentation" id="r1">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
> </tr>
> <tr role="presentation" id="r2">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
> </tr>
>
> Or, taking it one step further, allow aria-owns to reference itself, which
> would place the natural children of the element into the ownership at that
> point in the order so I could do:
>
> <tr role="row" aria-owns="t1r1 t2r1" id="t1r1">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
> </tr>
> <tr role="row" aria-owns="t1r2 t2r2" id="t1r2">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
> </tr>
> <tr role="presentation" id="t2r1">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
> </tr>
> <tr role="presentation" id="t2r2">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
>   <td role="gridcell">
> </tr>
>
> If people like this idea I would be happy to come up with some spec text
> to allow it.
>
> Regards,
> James
>
>
> On 2/15/2015 8:07 AM, Alexander Surkov wrote:
>
>   Hi.
>
> aria-owns is used to define parent-child relationship [1]. The spec says
> nothing how aria-owns affects on between-siblings relations, i.e. where
> aria-owns children have to be in the hierarchy. So there's no way for the
> author to control the ordering of explicit and aria-owns children. The idea
> [2] was to let aria-owns to refer its own children to change the ordering.
> For example,
>
>  <div role="grid"
>  <div role="row" aria-owns="c1 c2 c3 c4">
>    <div role="gridcell" id="c1">cell1</div>
>   <div role="gridcell" id="c2">cell1</div>
> </div>
>  </div>
>
>  <!-- somewhere in the DOM -->
>  <div role="gridcell" id="c3">cell1</div>
> <div role="gridcell" id="c4">cell1</div>
>
>  In this case role="row" would contain 4 cells in the order specified by
> aria-owns.
>
>  If the idea looks reasonable then the spec could be changed this way
>
> Insert after existing wording:
> "The value <http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/terms#def_value> of the
> aria-owns attribute <http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/terms#def_attribute>
> is a space-separated list of IDREFS that reference one or more elements in
> the document by ID."
>
> something like:
> "The order the referred elements listed in the value should be preserved
> when their parent-child relationship is set. All explicit unreferred
> children should be considered followed aria-owns elements."
>
>  Thanks.
> Alexander.
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/states_and_properties#aria-owns
> [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1133213
>
>
>