- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 01:01:42 +0000 (UTC)
On Sun, 12 Jun 2005, Derek Featherstone wrote: > >> > >> Anyway, having the ability to add a help link in the body, with > >> particular context-sensitivity (as discussed for including a link > >> with rel="help" in a form control label) is probably sufficient. I'll > >> take that discussion back to W3C's Protocols and Formats group (the > >> part of WAI that deals with review of specifications to ensure they > >> enable accessibility) and see what they think... > > > > Great! Thanks. I think your idea of making rel="help" be relative to > > the nearest parent <label> is a good one. We could also say it is > > relative to the nearest parent <label>, <body>, <section>, <form>, > > <fieldset>, or other such grouping element. I'll look at this in more > > detail when defining the rel="" values. The spec makes it relative to the parent of the <a> element. > I've actually been thinking about that for a while - rather than leaving > it to a "guess" why not bind it specifically with something like an > about attribute that identifies the specific element/node it references? > > rel="help" about="#phone-number" > > That would allow for much more flexibility and robustness wouldn't it? On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Matthew Thomas wrote: > > Or perhaps <a ... rel="help" for="phone-number">, to be consistent with > the for= attribute in <label>. This is a possibility, but is it really needed? In general it seems we'd want to encourage authors to put the links near the text and controls to which it applies. > Many applications provide inline help which is not a label, and the same > attributes would be appropriate here: <div rel="help" > for="phone-number"><p>The full number, including country code.</p> > <p>Example: <samp>+61 3 1234 5678</samp></p></div> How would UAs use this? > The cite= attribute was also mentioned in this thread as one that is > practically useless because there is no good way of presenting it. > (Sometimes authors use JavaScript to pull it out of a <blockquote> and > present it as a link underneath. But that still has accessibility > problems, because it doesn't work without JavaScript, and the resulting > link text is either a raw URL or the same text for every quote. These > problems make the technique even more unworkable for <q>.) As a result, > authors usually use an <a> link to the resource they're quoting (look at > most self-hosted Weblogs for examples), and there ends up being no > machine-readable connection between the link and the quote. This could > similarly be achieved in the <a> element with a for= attribute giving > the ID of the <blockquote> or <q> element. Interesting idea. > The majority of authors still wouldn't use these attributes, because it > would give them no presentational benefit. But at least authors would be > slightly more likely to use them than to use attributes that they have > to re-present using extra elements or JavaScript. We should probably aim higher than that though... -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 30 October 2007 18:01:42 UTC