Re: @aria-describedat at-risk in ARIA 1.1 heartbeat draft

> On Dec 5, 2014, at 5:16 PM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:
> 
> Can we get a technical explanation of why this is now being considered as an
> at-risk item?

It’s been at risk previously, the only change is that the upcoming heartbeat draft will reference this thread instead of listing specific comments in the WD.

> Putting aside personal preferences for a minute, what is the nature of the risk? 

The nature of the risk is that implementors are extremely unlikely to implement these 3 RFC-2119 requirements. 

>> User agents should provide a device-independent mechanism to allow a user to navigate the user agent to content referenced by the aria-describedat attribute. User agents should also provide a device-independent mechanism to return the user's focus from the descriptive content view to the original content view. For example, a user agent may provide access to the document or document fragment referenced by the aria-describedat attribute in a contextual menu associated with the object.
Cite: http://rawgit.com/w3c/aria/master/aria/aria.html#aria-describedat

The PFWG voted to add a mainstream UI requirement based on an ARIA attribute (~UAs SHOULD, not ATs MAY) which goes against an established pattern and previously stated goal of ARIA. The outcome of the vote was in direct conflict with serious concerns from from member representatives of three different user agent vendors: WebKit, Blink, and Gecko.  

I should note that the vote happened on a phone call where I was the primary dissenter. The other who expressed concern were not present on the phone call and the vote was not extended to the email list.

James