Drop longdesc, get aria-describedat?

Janina, Richard - and the ARIA community. The F2F Minutes Extract on 
Action-970 says: [1]

> rich: [ snip ] when we do describedat, will ask browsers for
>       a vehicle to render that location

Question: Is there a chance that "we could do" @aria-describedat *now*? 
I am convinced that the chances for a amicable solution would increase 
greatly if one could move from talk to action with regard to 
@aria-describedat.

> agreement in room: longdesc and describedat are preferable to this
> because they're so very much simpler

There are potential problems related to having both @longdesc and 
@aria-describedat: @longdesc as a HTML5 native feature, would be the 
HTML WG's domain. It is not clear to me, yet, what rules you plan with 
regard to @aria-describedat's permission point to for example sections 
that are hidden via aria-hidden=true. But what is certain is that 
@longdesc would be subject the rules that the HTMLwg decides also in 
this detail.

Whereas the rules for aria-describedat, would be entirely in the hands 
of PF/the ARIA community. When we consider how difficult it seems to be 
to agree about how to @hidden relates to ARIA, it seems to me to it 
*could* be an advantage if we only had @aria-describedat instead of two 
attributes with potentially different rules.

We could also view it tactically: The negativity towards @longdesc 
could - if the two attributes get linked in people' mind - spill over 
to @aria-describedat. Also, as long as neither @longdesc nor 
@aria-describedat are legal, then neither author or vendors are picking 
any of them up.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2012Mar/0004
-- 
Leif Halvard Silli

Received on Wednesday, 7 March 2012 01:55:13 UTC