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Re: Accessible P Tag Usage

for

From: Duff Johnson
Date: Apr 2, 2019 7:37PM

Sorry to pause this so long - I was away on vacation.

I continue to be confused by what I've read on this point, so I hope you will bear with me,

> On Mar 21, 2019, at 20:10, Jonathan Avila < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>> But how do you define "best"? Tangible advantages? Ability in some AT to jump to next paragraph that may not be available if marked as <div>?
>
> Both NVDA and JAWS move to next and prior divs with the same command as paragraphs control+down and control+up arrows -- there appears to be no difference. I'm not sure that a JAWS or NVDA user would have any idea if a div or paragraph was used on a webpage without looking at code.


So that tells you that <div> is (functionally) mapped to <p>. Will that be correct in all cases? It seems like the claim here is "yes". Maybe, if that were all, I could see it...

But <div> (or <span>) could be used in all sorts of ways that conflict with correct representation of the semantics.

Here's a snippet of HTML in which we have a "floppy" <div>:

<p>…and the bank account number is 123 456 789"<p>
<div>223</div>

What's the relationship between the <p> and the <div>? We don't know.

If it were unambiguously tagged for semantics, it would either be:

<p>…and the bank account number is 123 456 789"<p>
<p>223</p>

or...

<p>…and the bank account number is 123 456 789 223<p>

These would have very different meanings, and serialization doesn't solve the problem.

<div> doesn't "mean" anything at all. Seems to me that the "floppy" use of <div> makes for an inability to guarantee full recovery of semantics. Reliance on serialization to order the content correctly isn't the same as ensuring disambiguation has occurred.

How can you assume the semantics of content that's only wrapped in <div>? As a fallback, mere serialization seems of course necessary but also insufficient, no?

Duff.