Re: conflation of issues or convergence of interests?

On 7/28/07, Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk> wrote:
> Agreed, but user agents need to, imho, also be able to make sense of the
> markup/content associations, so they can let the end user know that
> they're not missing out on any content just because they can't render
> the video, for instance.

I have a thought that HTML5 may already offer a strong solution for this.

Take your typical YouTube page. It features a video, information
relating to that video. It's got a header and footer like most
websites, a bunch of navigation and some related videos.

Let's add some HTML5 markup that represents the relationships between
this information (within a single page).

You could group the video, it's heading and all the metadata about it
together using <article>. That way you can even using a <h2> (or
similar) for the title, which I think may be better than a
figure/legend in a page like YouTube. It's the main focus of the page
so article seems highly appropriate.

You can indicate other page elements are NOT related by using:
1. other <section> elements, maybe <header> and <footer> for the
YouTube page design bits
2. <nav> for all the navigational bits that aren't related to this video
3. <aside> for bits that are "tangentially" related … maybe comments,
maybe related videos …

Let me steal some words from the spec, because these are well written
and very relevant:

A section, in this context, is a thematic grouping of content
— http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#sections

When article elements are nested, the inner article elements represent
articles that are in principle related to the contents of the outer
article.
— http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-article

The aside element represents a section of a page that consists of
content that is tangentially related to the content around the aside
element, and which could be considered separate from that content.
— http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-aside

The video itself could use <video> (with fallback) and <figure> and
<legend> - but that's really not that helpful for capturing the
relationships between related/unrelated sections of the page … ;)

HTML5 provides all of this. Of course, it will be up to authors,
users, UAs and AT to do something meaningful with it. I suspect WCAG
will supply "HTML5 techniques" to clarify and guide us (authors) at
some point, likewise maybe UAAG for the UAs? I think HTML5 has
provided exactly what I expect from a markup language design
perspective, on this issue :)

Have a ponder …

cheers
Ben

Received on Saturday, 28 July 2007 13:20:58 UTC