Question about a rowgroup note

Hi all.

Sorry for not having the new table roles completed in time for last
week's meeting. I'll have them (at least drafted and in a branch) for
this week's.

In between now and then, I've been amassing questions for the group. :)
Some I'm still mulling over; others, I'm ready to ask now. I'll start
with this one:

Currently, the rowgroup role has the following note:

<quote>
The rowgroup role exists, in part, to support role symmetry in HTML, and
allows for the propagation of presentation inheritance on HTML table
elements with an explicit presentation role applied.
</quote>

If we're going to have new thead, tfoot, and tbody ARIA roles, then the
"support role symmetry" bit is obsolete. That leaves the bit about
presentation inheritance. Could someone please elaborate on that use case?

If you have something like this:

<table role="none">
  <tbody>
    <tr><td>A</td><td>B</td></tr>
    <tr><td>C</td><td>D</td></tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

The descendants of the now-presentational table lose their table-related
nature, i.e. the rows go away, the cells become generic objects, etc.
Slapping a role="rowgroup" on the tbody element (or failing to do so)
doesn't change that propagation, right?

The only possible use case that occurs to me is that adding a role to
the tbody in a presentational table is to keep the tbody element from
being pruned from the tree along with the rows. Is that it? (And if so,
do others think that is clear from the above note? And do we need to add
something to the User Agent Implementation spec?) If not, then I need a
hint. :)

Thanks!
--joanie

Received on Monday, 30 March 2015 23:05:27 UTC