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Re: HTML specs - can I whine for a minute?

for

From: glen walker
Date: Aug 20, 2021 9:49AM

Thanks for the github reference, Léonie. Looks like a lot of thought went
into it 4 years ago, then there was a 2 year lull, then it picked up again
2 years ago but has been silent since then. Since I haven't volunteered my
time to help with this issue, I can't complain about how long it's taking.

It would be nice for the spec to have all the information in one place so I
don't have to follow several links to gather what I need, but I also
understand not repeating information in several documents because that's
harder to maintain and keep in sync.

At a minimum, the html spec should have links to the *specific* role and
attribute sections for that element and not just point to the top of a very
long document. So the spec for the button element,

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#the-button-element

could have a link to the valid roles for the button,

https://w3c.github.io/html-aria/#el-button

and a link to the valid attributes for the default role,

https://w3c.github.io/aria/#button
(or https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/#button or
https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.2/#button or insert your favorite flavor
of WAI-ARIA)

Quick tangent, as a sighted user, I like the formatting style of the
TR/wai-aria documents (eg, https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.2/#button) with
table grid lines and row shading to help the eye track the information.
The github version of the doc (https://w3c.github.io/aria/#button) has
neither grid lines nor shading so is much harder to read. But that is just
a simple styling adjustment. I'm guessing (hoping) when the github
document becomes official, the styling will be better. At least it's using
semantic html and table row headers :-)