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

In practice, getting authors to reliably mark up all the "uninteresting"
sections properly, in order to enable the exclusion to come up with exactly
what you want, is more like an interesting thought experiment.

In practice, getting authors to reliably mark up any section properly will
be an interesting experiment :)

Regards
Harry




On 27 March 2013 15:42, Charles McCathie Nevile <chaals@yandex-team.ru>wrote:

> On Wed, 27 Mar 2013 03:07:19 +0100, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>
>  On Tue, 26 Mar 2013, Steve Green wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> If there are multiple sections of uninteresting content it is necessary
>>> to perform multiple 'skip' actions in order to get to the interesting
>>> content.
>>>
>>
>> Not necessarily. That's up to the user agent / accessibility tool
>> implementors. I'm saying that the interface that user agents /
>> accessibility tools should offer is specifically one that skips sequences
>> of uninteresting content, so that you only have to instruct the software
>> to skip uninteresting content once to get to the interesting content.
>>
>> Note that this kind of solution is necessary in any case when interesting
>> content _contains_ sequences of uninteresting content.
>>
>>  This is a poor user experience compared with performing a single 'skip'
>>> action to get to the main content.
>>>
>>
>> I agree, but this is orthogonal to how the content is marked up. You
>> don't need role="" or <main> to achieve this.
>>
>
> In theory, that is true. In practice, getting authors to reliably mark up
> all the "uninteresting" sections properly, in order to enable the exclusion
> to come up with exactly what you want, is more like an interesting thought
> experiment.
>
> The observable behaviour of authors who actually care about getting this
> right suggests that a single positive label is far more intuitive, and
> likely to result in success, than an algorithm which relies on doing
> everything else right in order to produce the desired result as a natural
> remainder.
>
> Which is why we think the HTML-WG version of the main element is actually
> sensible and useful.
>
> cheers
>
>
> --
> Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
>       chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com
>
>