Re: proliferation of reference roles in the dpub aria spec.

On Tue, 13 Oct 2015 21:33:26 +0200, Richard Schwerdtfeger  
<schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:

>
> What I am suggesting is that we ask the Coga group to take a subset of  
> ARIA. The Coga group agreed to go the ARIA route vs. RDFA. ARIA has far  
> greater uptake that >RDFA.
For the most part, my proposal isn't that people take up RDFa at all. In a  
few cases, where we can demonstrate that it is already used for what COGA  
wants on millions of domains (as in, scientifically measured to be more  
than 10^6, not just "a lot"), I am suggesting we recognise that reality  
instead f trying to convince people to adopt a directly competing approach.

But in the general case I am suggesting that instead of taking up new  
aria, trying to convince the world to change how they implement aria, and  
to implement something that competes with what people are already doing,  
COGA use build on existing HTML.

(RDFa is fast getting to the point where more of the sites indexed by  
major search engines have it than not, mostly for opengraph and  
schema.org. I am pleased if ARIA is really getting that kind of uptake -  
but curious where the figures come from. But that is beside the point).

cheers
>
> Rich Schwerdtfeger
>
> "Chaals McCathie Nevile" ---10/13/2015 10:02:25 AM---On Tue, 13 Oct 2015  
> 14:51:38 +0200, lisa.seeman <lisa.seeman@zoho.com>   wrote:
>
> From: "Chaals McCathie Nevile" <chaals@yandex-team.ru>
> To: Siegman <tsiegman@wiley.com>, "lisa.seeman" <lisa.seeman@zoho.com>
> Cc: "John Foliot" <john.foliot@deque.com>, Richard  
> Schwerdtfeger/Austin/IBM@IBMUS, "'Ivan Herman'" <ivan@w3.org>, "'W3C PF  
> - DPUB Joint Task Force'" <public-dpub-aria@w3.org>, "'PF'"  
> <public-pfwg@w3.org>, >Lisa Seeman/Bethesda/Contr/IBM@IBMUS, "'James  
> Craig'" <jcraig@apple.com>
> Date: 10/13/2015 10:02 AM
> Subject: Re: proliferation of reference roles in the dpub aria spec.
>
>
>
> On Tue, 13 Oct 2015 14:51:38 +0200, lisa.seeman <lisa.seeman@zoho.com>  
> wrote:
>
> Hi Folks
>
> You can look at an early draft of what COGA are thinking for ARIA at  
> https://rawgit.com/w3c/coga/master/issue-papers/links-buttons.html
> It is an early draft, and we have not yet voted to pass it for wider  
> circulation, but I think it is worth hearing these kind of comments  
> earlier.
> You can also see a demo of a possible implementation at  
> http://rawgit.com/ayelet-seeman/coga.personalisation/demo/conactUs.html
>
> What is not mentioned is that the semantics needs to as easy as possible  
> to use. (The direction of RDFA often raises the bar to high for the Web  
> >Authors we hope to appeal too.)
>
> Yes, that is one concern I had while suggesting that we should  
> piggy-back on schema.org. On the other hand, being used in millions of  
> domains means there are a lot of examples out there. And one thing i  
> think the >schema.org folks (which include me) would be very happy about  
> is improving examples on the site itself, to make them easier to  
> understand and copy.
>
> But for things that can be defined by rel - and for things that *already  
> are*, like glossary, help, next, previous, start, … the syntax is very  
> simple. And I suspect we will have fewer typos in rel= than we will in  
> aria->destination=
>
> (Another theoretical concern with schema is that it is published by 4  
> companies who can change it at will, based on their own commercial goals  
> - but I think that is not important in practice, since a vocabulary is  
> really >made by the way it is used. Just as Dublin Core "author" became  
> one of the most popular terms in metadata, despite never actually  
> existing in Dublin Core specifications, if a lot of people are using  
> something in >schema.org for something other than search engines, even  
> if we change the formal schema people can keep doing what they did. The  
> IE6 story shows how hard it is to change that even for a company with a  
> huge >budget and very good reasons to try…)
>
> cheers
>
>
>
>> All the best
>
> Lisa Seeman
>
>> Athena ICT Accessibility Projects
> LinkedIn, Twitter
>
>
>
>
>> ---- On Tue, 13 Oct 2015 15:37:34 +0300 Siegman<tsiegman@wiley.com>  
>> wrote ----
> Piping in from the DPUB side of things. Apologies for the silence,  
> several of us were at a workshop last week.
>   
> @rel seems to be made for this, and it came up as an even broader use  
> case in the workshop last, which addressed the IDPF’s revision of EPUB.
>   
> The one thing that does concern us is that it is a little unclear who  
> “owns” the rel registry and how specifically terms are defined.
>
>   
> Tzviya Siegman
> Digital Book Standards & Capabilities Lead
> Wiley
> 201-748-6884
> tsiegman@wiley.com  
>   
> From: John Foliot [mailto:john.foliot@deque.com]Sent: Monday, October  
> 12, 2015 6:52 PM
> To: 'Richard Schwerdtfeger'
> Cc: 'Ivan Herman'; 'W3C PF - DPUB Joint Task Force'; 'PF'; 'Lisa  
> Seeman'; 'Chaals McCathie Nevile'; 'James Craig'
> Subject: RE: proliferation of reference roles in the dpub aria spec.
>   
> Hi Rich,
>   
> Chiming in here, I have to agree with Chaals, the @rel attribute does  
> (is intended to do) exactly what you are talking about.
>   
> Having a new series of @rel values (dpub.foo or coga.foo) would be  
> consistent with existing technology/techniques today. In fact, related  
> to one >requirement from the dpub folks, there is already a “brainstorm”  
> proposal for rel=”bibliography” in the wiki:  
> http://microformats.org/wiki/existing->rel-values (nearer the end of the  
> document).
>   
> I’ll also point out to Chaals that better implementation of @rel *could*  
> also serve as an alternative to @accesskey  
> (http://john.foliot.ca/link->relationships-as-an-alternative-to-accesskeys)  
> in that a standardized list of @rel values would also be useful for  
> end-users to map accesskey-like >behaviors to, using keystroke  
> combinations *the user* chooses (as opposed to the author, who will  
> likely get it wrong as often as right). J  
>   
> Finally, the fact that new values can (could) easily be added to a  
> standardized list is extremely useful, although I question the use of a  
> public wiki >for that, as perhaps being a little too informal a  
> mechanism to record what would be essentially mission-critical values  
> moving forward (i.e. anyone >could add, remove or edit values with no  
> actual process/security net behind that). I vaguely recall this being a  
> point of discussion quite a while >back, however, to date I will also  
> note that this type of possible abuse has not (yet) manifested, so  
> perhaps I am overly concerned about nothing…
>   
> I will also reiterate my concern that currently ARIA is suffering from a  
> ghettoization of sorts, in that it is seen as *only* for Assistive  
> Technology >such as screen readers, which is an unfortunate but real  
> reality today.
>   
> JF
>   
> From: Chaals McCathie Nevile [mailto:chaals@yandex-team.ru]Sent: Monday,  
> October 12, 2015 4:45 PM
> To: James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>; Richard Schwerdtfeger  
> <schwer@us.ibm.com>
> Cc: Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org>; W3C PF - DPUB Joint Task Force  
> <public-dpub-aria@w3.org>; PF <public-pfwg@w3.org>; Lisa Seeman  
> ><lseeman@us.ibm.com>
> Subject: Re: proliferation of reference roles in the dpub aria spec.
>   
> Hi RIch,
>   
> I think we are still talking past each other.
>   
> It sounds like the COGA group is looking for an attribute whose values  
> can be defined, in a list that can be easily extended, that can describe  
> links >in a machine-readable way.
>   
> HTML has an attribute for that called rel. It has been around for a long  
> time, has been implemented in various ways all the way through different  
> >bits of the toolchain - and even beyond the Web, for whatever that is  
> worth.
>   
> There is also "rev" but the only value of that is where you want to  
> reduce the number of possible values - instead of having to have  
> rel="next" and >rel="previous" you could use rel="next" but rev="next"  
> to say that something else had rel="next", i.e. is the previous document.
>   
> More detail below.
>   
> On Mon, 12 Oct 2015 22:40:18 +0200, Richard Schwerdtfeger  
> <schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> That is not the issue and it has absolutely nothing to do with the  
> problem we are trying to solve which is that given a link we need to  
> know what the >destination type of the link it is going. This was  
> discussed at the last ARIA task force meeting. It is important that  
> people read the work going on in >the cognitive accessibility task force  
> and what is being done with dpub.
> Can you please provide some clearer sense of what we need to read? "All  
> of coga" isn't useful, some list of  15 wiki pages and 20 email threads  
> >from the last 4 months might be more rational.
> Coga needs to know that that link points to help information
> This is *exactly* the sort of thing rel does.
> In the HTML4 era  browsers provided those buttons in consistent places  
> such as at the top or bottom of the window, triggered by rel="help",  
> >rel="next", etc, as per the spec:  
> http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-html40-19980424/types.html#type-links
>   
> The HTML5 version appears to have less, since it defers to the wiki  
> which allows anyone to list a rel value and the spec for it, but it  
> explicitly >includes help, prev and next ...
> and a whole list of other features such that when styled they know the  
> purpose of the destination of the link so it can be styled using symbols  
> or >other mechanisms so that they can appear in a consistent way.
> Yes, but any attribute can be used for styling.
> This impacts aging, in that many web sites and applications style things  
> differently and the user gets lost. The dpub group had introduced  
> different >roles for things like glossary references that could easily  
> marked with role="link" and aria-destination="glossaryterm". A publisher  
> could style >these to look the same way and in a way that is easily  
> understood by different users.
> indeed:
>  *[role=link][rel=next] { /* your style for next */ }
>  *[role=link][rel=glossary]:before { /* your dictionary icon */ }
> Coga has suggested the use of an new aria-destination attribute that  
> could consume these values. This would allow us to still reuse the link  
> role for >these different types of links but then provide additional  
> information that would help drive toward a consistent look and feel.  
> @rel would be great >but unfortunately HTML shoved a bunch of totally  
> unrelated values in it.
> You don't need to handle irrelevant values. But for anything that needs  
> a particular behaviour, such as a link tothe next thing, or a link to  
> help, you >have to implement it whatever attribute it is in.
>   
> The nice thing about doing this on rel attributes is that you build on a  
> set of browser extensions, content, and tools that link content,  
> stretching back >more or less the whole history of the Web.
>   
> More to the point, some of the attributes you think are irrelevant match  
> the things I have read from COGA (although I may have misunderstood  
> >something).
>   
> rel="stylesheet alternate" title="simplified layout"
> rel="alternate" hreflang="en-x-kincaid-level-4" title="Easy to read"
>   
> These are things that real developers already know how to do. And things  
> that are relatively easy to crawl for. Which matters, because *finding*  
> >resources that are useful is also an important way to improve  
> accessibility.
>   
> Building on existing HTML to enable for example
>   
> <a rel="icon"
> <span role="link" onclick="popupDictionary(this.innerText)"  
> rel="glossary"
>   
> Would actually be very easy. I'd be very happy to do that in the Web  
> Platforms group, which is the new successor to both Web Apps and HTML,  
> at >the same time as following the existing trivial process of editing  
> the wiki that HTML5 uses for extending values.
> This would be for the link role and not the <link> element. The user  
> experience could care less if the @rel="prefetch". @rel is a hodge podge  
> of >unrelated values.   
> rel is currently applicable to link, a and area elements - because those  
> are the things that define links in HTML. It makes perfect logical sense  
> to >argue that something with role="link" is analagous to an a element,  
> and therefore the rel attribute should be valid, and have the same  
> behaviour as >it does for the a element.
> Charles had earlier asked how ATs processed @rel. On Windows, at least,  
> they don't and that may be because many of the values have no value to  
> >ATs.
> Sure. But nor does anything in existence process the aria-destination  
> attribute. Which puts it behind rel, since there are browsers in use  
> which >handle it. In any case, implementation is relatively simple...
>   
> var helpButton = document.querySelector('[role=link][rel=help],  
> a[rel=help], area[rel=help]');
>   
> document.addeventListener('help', helpButton.click);
>   
> Although most browsers don't emit a "help" event for pages so you might  
> want to define something temporary like a keyboard listener for 'f1' or  
> >add a button to the document (like ReSpec does for W3C working drafts).
> Making matters worse SVG2 doesn't even have a rel attribute:  
> https://svgwg.org/svg2-draft/attindex.html  
> But nor does it have an aria-destination attribute. In any event,  
> implementation is pretty much the same whatever it is called.
> So, I was interested in @rel as well but the solution quickly felt apart  
> for our purposes.
> I don't think it does. Your purpose is *exactly* what the rel attribute  
> was intended to do, and has done for a couple of decades. Making a  
> >*different* attribute to do the same thing seems like a bad way  
> forward. It introduces confusion, or double the work, at best.
> I have not seen the SVG WG indicate that it will adopt the HTML <a>
> It has an a element of its own. Adding a rel attribute as valid on that  
> is pretty trivial as far as I can tell, whether they adopt the HTML  
> element or >not.
> In studies with the aging population with NIDDR and in the Coga task  
> force that senior users want the user interface to be consistent in how  
> it looks >and where things are placed. For example, they don't want the  
> next link to appear indifferent places as they just can't process the  
> site. They get confused.
> This is exactly what the rel="next" attribute was used for by shipping  
> browsers, which placed it near the "contents", "previous", "help" and  
> "index" >buttons.
>   
> You might want to ask the browsers why they removed those, and how hard  
> it is to put them back (hint: trivial, although it would be good if they  
> >doubled the time allowed to a week, to get some decent design applied  
> this time)
> Consequently, we are talking about an aria-destination attribute. I have  
> cc'd Lisa Seeman if you have any questions from the Coga task force.
> 1. Does COGA care what the attribute is called?
> 2. Does COGA believe that
>   a. this attribute should *only* be relevant to people using  
> "specialised" technology, and
>   b. the attribute should not be processed to modify the user interface  
> of mainstream browsers?
>   
> (and repeating the request I started with, what do I need to read on  
> this topic?)
>   
> cheers
>   
> Chaals
>   
> --
> Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
> chaals@yandex-team.ru - - - Find more at http://yandex.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> --
> Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
> chaals@yandex-team.ru - - - Find more at http://yandex.com
>



-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
chaals@yandex-team.ru - - - Find more at http://yandex.com