Re: From the HTML-WG about aria-hidden

Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@målform.no> wrote:
 
> Yes, if 'specified properly' means 'specified in a way that vendors 
> will implement'.

By "specified properly" I mean, specified so that it solves all of the
problems which it is intended to address, and the requirements on authors and
user-agents are sufficiently well defined that it can be implemented
consistently.
> 
> First, I will say that ARIA can also be described as something that we 
> unfortunately must live with.

Actually, no, it can be progressively deprecated by moving what it expresses
into HTML and other markup languages. The content model of IMG, by contrast,
can't be changed without breaking compatibility with decades of software and
HTML documents.

> 
> Second: W.r.t. alternative content as child element, then I have news 
> for you, in that regard: Support for <object> is improving. And I have 
> recently written a change proposal for ISSUE-158 which will change the 
> content model of <object> to be more similar to what it was in HTML4. 
> This would allow authors to wrap an <object> in the anchor element 
> *and* place a link as child of <object>. This should be, quite frankly, 
> the HTML2.0 solution. You can read more about my proposal at the end of 
> this letter. I love to get feedback that could help me improve it. In 
> particular no screen reader user has wetted what I say there yet. But - 
> danger, danger: I *think* that there is a risk that my change proposal 
> for OBJECT could impact negatively on @longdesc ... Not because I want 
> to weaken @longesc [I would like it to be valid and also would like 
> support to incrase], but because it does provide another option for 
> doing what @longdesc is supposed to do.

I've read the proposal and I think it's entirely reasonable. I was a strong
supporter of OBJECT when it was introduced into what became HTML 4, and I
still think it's a better solution thank kludges such as @longdesc.

One possibility would be to fix the OBJECT content model as proposed, then
advise authors and authoring tool developers that if they need anything more
than @alt, OBJECT must be used. My suspicion, though, is that the desire for
backward-compatibility would kill that proposal in practice, at least in the
short term, which brings us back to properly specifying @longdesc, preferably
in addition to the OBJECT proposal rather than in place of it.

Received on Friday, 17 February 2012 05:04:01 UTC