Re: [WICG/webcomponents] Reference Target naming (Issue #1087)

dandclark left a comment (WICG/webcomponents#1087)

This was discussed in the [WebComponentsCG 2025 Q1 Face-to-Face](https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/1083#issuecomment-2660170704) with `delegatesTo` emerging as the preferred name.

> Dan: we should bikeshed the name - there isn’t a great consensus on the name. One complaint is that it is too long, especially in phase 2, when the attribute gets really long. There is an idea to shorten it - refs, or delegaterefs. Not sure there is anything people have fallen in love with. Status quo would be to run with what we have. If people want to advocate for a different thing, this might be a good time to do that.
Anne van Kesteren: I don’t mind delegate, but I don’t feel particularly strongly.
Olli: I don’t feel strongly, but I also don’t mind delegate.
Mayank: I don’t mind delegate - ref can be an overloaded term, especially with frameworks today. Between delegate and delegatesTo, the latter is more clear.
Dan: I slightly prefer delegates as a term, the length is slightly punishing. On templates it would be `shadowrootdelegatesreferenceariadescribedby`
Anne: can we just use delegates?
Dan: is that confusing with delegatesfocus
Keith Cirkel: could we do then shadowrootdelegatesariadescribedby (that is, remove the reference)
Westbrook: (re delegates vs delegate) delegate is both a verb and a noun
Mayank: should it be delegateId?
Anne: it’s not always an id - it’s the delegate element
Keith: the other id references don’t use id in the name, they use `target`.
\<Some consensus on delegatesTo\>
Dan: would it be valuable to have a survey? If there’s no champion for an alternative that may be worthwhile
Keith: If no one is in objective to delegatesTo, then maybe we don’t need a survey
Dan: I’m okay with having that be the new default pick.
Mayank: is that for both phase 1 and phase 2? It feels confusing for phase 2?
Dan: yeah, potentially we could reword it, to have `to` at the end
Anne: potentially you would remove the `to`
Mayank: `delegatesPopover` does read like a boolean.
Dan: maybe we could sort that out in a phase 2 discussion. It sounds like we can use `delegatesTo`.
Ryosuke: there is a confusion around the implementation around delegatesFocus. Maybe we could have delegates take in a boolean? Or rethink about how delegatesFocus behaves.
Dan: maybe there is a thing we could think around delegates
Keith: in the presence of a delegatesFocus attribute, maybe that takes precedence, but if you were to provide a string, then it could change that behavior? We could tie it together.
Dan: maybe if you give it an ID, we can change that behavior. There is a question of how this should behave if you also have delegateFocus, but I don’t know that we want to (in a default way) tie these together.


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