WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

HTML5 and new elements (was Re: Use of SAMP to highlight search results)

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Oct 28, 2010 1:33PM

On 28/10/2010 20:15, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
>
>> I'd say the "mark" element sounds more appropriate
>
> Within HTML5, yes. But HTML5 is an incomplete draft, or set of drafts,
> expected to be finalized maybe around year 2020.

Ok, apologies...I spend too much time recently in HTML5 land, and
realised afterwards that the thread starter didn't actually say "in HTML5".

However, to pick up on your last part...don't regard HTML5 as something
that is unusable until 2020 or whatever. Heck, CSS2.1 isn't finalised
yet either, and we seem to be using it quite happily as well. Rollout of
features is incremental, rather than a big bang wow now browsers support
HTML5.

> Moreover, the MARK element
> does not imply any particular rendering or other processing, in the browsers
> that recognize it.

It will be up to browsers to decide if they do want to provide it with a
default styling or not. Currently, not all browsers even have the HTML5
parsing algorithm running, though, so you're correct in that they won't
do anything special with MARK, just as with any other unrecognised element.

> It's a bad idea, if you ask me, to define an element for
> a certain kind of emphasis without saying that it should be rendered
> emphatically - the idea seems to be that authors will style it, naturally
> routinely ignoring non-visual browsing, among other things.

Again, it's up to browsers to decide if there will be a default styling.
At the moment, there isn't (for most of the new HTML5 elements)

Anyway, I digress,

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke