Re: From the HTML-WG about aria-hidden

Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@målform.no> wrote:
 
> Jason, when I read your comment about complexity, I started to wonder 
> why you eventually would see it as more complicated for the author to 
> do <a hidden href> compared with <a aria-hidden=true href>.
> 
> But now I understand that what you really mean is that it would be 
> simpler to add longdesc=link directly on the <img>. And I won't deny 
> that you are right.
> 
> However, authors might find it simpler to test how @hidden works 
> compared with testing how @longdesc works. Because, as you know, 
> authors often don't get those things right that they don't see any 
> effect from. [And I realize that now I talk as if the @longdesc support 
> won't improve.] 

And that's where your case founders.

If @longdesc is specified properly, then there will be a mechanisms that
allows authors to see its content, so the above argument doesn't apply.

Any solution has to be carefully specified to increase the likehihood of
consistent and useful implementations.

I don't like @longdesc because I think it's just a hack to deal with a bad
design decision made prior to HTML 2.0, whereby IMG is not a container
element and therefore cannot have alternative content supplied. Unfortunately,
decades later, we have to live with the legacy of this and other decisions. In
that context, @longdesc solves a problem, but could be better specified on the
user-agent side. There may be superior solutions, but the proposal discussed in
this thread isn't one of them in my opinion.

Received on Friday, 17 February 2012 04:10:45 UTC