WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: label element containing input element

for

From: steven
Date: Jul 1, 2011 9:33AM

Jared, I agree that "placing the form control within the label element" is
semantic nonsense, but so long as HTML/5 continues to places tags in tags
(there seems to be no getting away from placing links within paragraphs for
example), I actually prefer for form elements to be within labels simply
because there is very good support for it as such (and I strongly believe
true accessibility is as much about backwards compatibility as it is about
future compatibility - long live plain text files).

I personally would love nothing more than for browsers to handle truely
semantic content and actually see web pages move controls and navigation
into the browser itself (or even be moved into a non-content layer) but
looking at the short steps HTML5 has made since XHTML I don't see there
being a big hurry for this. We're still wrapping and duplicating content
(albeit with more semantically named tags), mixing content with function
(why oh why do we still place menus and links within a document!?) ... we
haven't learned much in my opinion with HTML5 as we're still delivering more
than the content that is required in most cases and that is the
responsibility of habit I guess.

Thanks for the tip about the for/id too ... I must investigate that some
more.

Steven