Re: aria-describedat?

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 8:41 AM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 9:17 PM, david bolter <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I'm right here :)
>>
>> Did anyone ever write an addon? Should be straightforward and would help
>> move forward.
>
> Well, I've linked to the addon that Charles wrote for Opera to give
> some idea of what I have in mind.
>
> Patrick Lauke wrote a longdesc addon that just adds a context menu
> action a million years ago:
>
>   https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/longdesc/
>
> I've toyed with the idea of writing an addon, but I'm not entirely
> clear if it would move things forward or not. Patrick's attempt all
> those years ago doesn't seem to have helped much. In particular, I'm
> worried that the existence of an addon gives the impression that this
> functionality does not need to built in to browsers so as to be
> available at the point of use.
>
> Do you really think putting together a new addon would help?
>
> At the very least, I should imagine anyone putting effort into this
> would want some sort of buy-in from Firefox gatekeepers that some sort
> of built-in UI might be appropriate further down the line.

No opposition to the idea in the first place to me seems to also be
some indication that the gatekeepers don't really care.

I guess the only way to find out is to write the patch and try to land it.

I agree with you that spending time on a plugin is really a waste of
time, since it doesn't solve the core problem.

If you have the cycles, I'd encourage you to write the patch. In my
mind, the name of the attribute is indeed secondary. Primarily I want
the functionality implemented. If we can get an implementation of
@longdesc support in a way that it really should be done and that is
applicable to other elements, too, then we are in a better position to
move forward. If eventually the attribute is given a different name in
the spec and applied to other elements, adapting that code to cover
both the legacy @longdesc and the new attribute is really a minor
problem.

HTH.

Cheers,
Silvia.