Re: aria-describedat?

I'd say it makes sense to try to get an attention of gatekeepers prior
you start hacking. Otherwise you have good chances you spent a time
but they aren't going to take your patch ever.
Alex.

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 6:14 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer
<[email protected]> wrote:
> 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.