Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] The `interesttarget` attribute (Issue #1058)

xiaochengh left a comment (w3ctag/design-reviews#1058)

Hi @mfreed7, and thanks for your review request. We appreciate the use case, and it fits the positive recent trend of bringing widgets into HTML & CSS, and not requiring JS. The opportunity here to improve accessibility sounds good.

We have been discussing `interesttarget`, but we don't currently have consensus on a specific way that we think you should proceed. We do, however, have a few things we'd like to raise with you - either to ask if you had considered them as approaches, or to point out relevant other parts of the web platform.

1. Do you have any data on how widely-requested this feature is by devs? Related, it would help to build up more of a repertoire of use cases. There are at least two on GitHub, which you mention (passively previewing the vital stats of an issue/PR, and previewing a person's info, with the option of following them). However, it would be helpful to collect more; particularly to see if any patterns emerge.

2. Regarding alternative approaches: have you considered approaching this problem in a different way - e.g. could it (at least for some use cases) be better addressed by providing a more appropriate preview of the target document, in the case of links having interest targets? Two ways this might be achieved are:

   * responding to the preview viewport (i.e. having the UA signal that the document is in a preview viewport, and responding to that); and

   * providing for an alternative document to be given as the preview for a link. (Having a wider review of use cases could help here.)

3. [Moderate eagerness](https://developer.chrome.com/blog/speculation-rules-improvements#eagerness) speculation rules would trigger a prefetch/prerender when the user hovers over a link (under the assumption that it's something the user wants to click). But the `interesttarget` design pattern (whether native or implemented in JS) means that users hover over links without the intention of clicking them. This introduces a tension that should be considered.

We look forward to any input you can provide on the above.

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Received on Thursday, 15 May 2025 11:09:11 UTC