- From: Anthony Grasso <anthony.grasso@cisra.canon.com.au>
- Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:48:27 +1000
- To: Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>
- CC: public-xhtml2@w3.org, Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com>, aleventh@us.ibm.com, www-svg <www-svg@w3.org>
Hi Doug, Doug Schepers wrote: >> >> So as far as I can tell 'roles' are specified on elements and it kind >> of categorises them? right? > > Right, the 'role' attribute can be used to simply provide some semantics > without any behavior, so you could label something as related to > navigation, or as a banner ad, or pretty much any other categorization > that people find useful. The 'class' attribute could also be used this > way, but that's more controversial, since some people think that CSS > should only be used for styling, and that attaching semantics to it adds > content. > > >> If the above is correct, then I guess this gives implementations the >> option to treat elements in a certain way according to their 'role'? > > Right again, in combination with the ARIA taxonomy, a UA can assign > particular preset behaviors (including supplying user notifications and > choices of actions) to elements so labeled. > Ahhh ok. I see. That makes sense. > > >> Or again if the above is correct, a use case would be having an XSLT >> to remove all of the elements that have 'navigation' 'role' when >> printing? > > I don't think that's a primary use case in the minds of the designers, > but neither do I think it's a violation of the spirit of it. In fact, > the 'role' attribute could take on special values that pertain > specifically to print, and don't affect the on-screen rendering or > interactive behavior at all. > Ahhh, of course. > As I understand it, 'role' is meant to be pretty generic, though the > XHTML2 WG has some clever uses for it already in mind. > Ok, nice! I'm curious to see the use cases that XHTML2 WG have - mainly because this sounds very interesting. > >> Is my understanding correct... or have missed the boat completely? > > No, I think you just caught a different boat, but it's also traveling in > a useful direction. It's good to have people thinking in different > directions. That 'role' can be useful to offscreen uses (not just > print, but pre- or post-processing, and for a variety of tasks with > XSLT) reinforces that it is is useful to add. > No worries. It does seem like that it's something handy to have around. Thanks for the feedback. I have a better understanding for the purpose of 'role'. Cheers, Anthony
Received on Saturday, 6 October 2007 14:48:55 UTC