Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Early design review: CSS Toggles (Issue #730)

Sorry, I'm going to add some noise... I don't want to hijack or confuse this issue but I'm very interested in this one actually and also it's potential connections to several other developing ideas. One thing that I've started thinking about recently, especially due to involvement in OpenUI research is where delineations are between things that are unchanging controls vs something that is really in pursuit mainly of adapting presentation (an affordance). An example of this, perhaps, is that many/most native toolkits start with something simple - a ScrollPane.  That is a component with its own API - but the web didn't choose to make a `<scrollpane>` element, but rather chose to say that overflow is a matter of style and whether it is functionally acting like a scrolling pane or not is thus clearly in the domain of CSS. When something becomes a scrollable area it becomes a sort of pseudo-interactive element. It is, unfortunately, I think still a little under-defined as to what exactly that means but it affects focus in some browsers and some kind of keyboard handling.  We probably need some more focus here on even providing keyboard parity (see https://github.com/w3c/html-aam/issues/358, for example).

You can contrast this with perhaps the only other non-form participating element we've done before dialog, `<details>`. Here we said `<details>` has a component nature - but that means that it is not possible to say "On a big screen I'd like it to be open because there's plenty of room" or "when it is printed, it's just content".  We raised new questions about searching and linking and so on there too.

Along the way in our discussions we came to some ideas (some of which Toggles may potentially provide an explanation of the magic behind) about being able to provide some simple UI patterns that could offer affordances for some simple common patterns.  I'm bringing this up because we've not submitted that for even an early review - there are too many questions still.  Among them perhaps were some questions raised related to whether things with affordances really _were_ 'the same' as their actual counterpart components which exist in 'applications'.  To this end, we've split off some work with some discussion in an issue filed by me and Sarah Higley: https://github.com/openui/open-ui/issues/559 .. It might be interesting or helpful to have a look if you can find the time.

-- 
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/730#issuecomment-1215370272
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.

Message ID: <w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/730/1215370272@github.com>