RE: Rethinking the necessities of ARIA landmark role "main" and HTML5 <main> element

Ian Hickson wrote:
"In the interface I am proposing, there is no repeated questioning. The user indicates to the software that the user wishes to skip uninteresting content and jump to interesting content, in a single action (exactly the same kind of action as is used to jump to a header, or to jump to a specific landmark role). Then, the user agent skips all uninteresting content and jumps straight to the content the user wants (the same content as would be marked with <main> or role=main)."

>From the user's point of view I think this is right. The phrases "interesting" and "uninteresting" are too subjective to be helpful, but essentially a single command that moves focus to the start of the main content area of the page is the goal.

>From an implementation point of view I think this is inefficient. It's more reliable and less process intensive to move from A to Z, than it is to move from A, to B, to C, to D and so on until all that remains by a process of elimination is Z.

So if the goal is to have a single mechanism for moving directly to a given point on the page, what's the hook the UA uses to make that possible?


Léonie.
-- 
Carpe diem.


-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Hickson [mailto:ian@hixie.ch] 
Sent: 27 March 2013 02:11
To: JF
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: Rethinking the necessities of ARIA landmark role "main" and HTML5 <main> element

On Tue, 26 Mar 2013, JF wrote:
>
> A man arrives at the San Jose airport in Silicon Valley.
> 
> "I want to go to the campus" he tells the cab driver.
> 
> "The Stanford campus?", asks the cabbie.
>
> [...]

Could you explain to me how this analogy corresponds to the discussion? In the interface I am proposing, there is no repeated questioning. The user indicates to the software that the user wishes to skip uninteresting content and jump to interesting content, in a single action (exactly the same kind of action as is used to jump to a header, or to jump to a specific landmark role). Then, the user agent skips all uninteresting content and jumps straight to the content the user wants (the same content as would be marked with <main> or role=main).

The user experience is _exactly_ the same as the experience possible with explicit landmark roles. The only difference is how it is marked up.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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Received on Wednesday, 27 March 2013 08:51:25 UTC