On Oct 30, 2007, at 6:01 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
...
On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Matthew Thomas wrote:
Or perhaps <a ... rel="help" for="phone-number">, to be consistent
with the for= attribute in <label>.
This is a possibility, but is it really needed? In general it seems
we'd want to encourage authors to put the links near the text and
controls to which it applies.
Sure, but I don't see how it's different from <label> in that respect:
we want to encourage authors to put <label> near the control to which
it applies, but <label> already has for=. (<label> can have weak
semantic value even when not related to a particular control, but then
so could rel="help".)
Many applications provide inline help which is not a label, and the
same attributes would be appropriate here: <div rel="help"
for="phone-number"><p>The full number, including country code.</p>
<p>Example: <samp>+61 3 1234 5678</samp></p></div>
How would UAs use this?
UAs likely wouldn't, but scripts could. For example, a form might
include sparing help by default, with a style sheet hiding more
exhaustive help (as indicated by rel="help"). Then a script could add a
small help button after each control that has associated help (i.e.
each control with name="x" where there exists an element on the page
with rel="help" for="x"). When a control's help button was clicked, the
control's help would be shown.
Another possible presentation would be reserving whitespace to the
right of the form, and making <whatever rel="help" for="x"> visible in
that space whenever <input name="x"> was focused.
<http://uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000191.php> shows these and other
examples of dynamic help.
The cite= attribute was also mentioned in this thread as one that is
practically useless because there is no good way of presenting it.
(Sometimes authors use JavaScript to pull it out of a <blockquote> and
present it as a link underneath. But that still has accessibility
problems, because it doesn't work without JavaScript, and the
resulting link text is either a raw URL or the same text for every
quote. These problems make the technique even more unworkable for
<q>.) As a result, authors usually use an <a> link to the resource
they're quoting (look at most self-hosted Weblogs for examples), and
there ends up being no machine-readable connection between the link
and the quote. This could similarly be achieved in the <a> element
with a for= attribute giving the ID of the <blockquote> or <q>
element.
Interesting idea.
The majority of authors still wouldn't use these attributes, because
it would give them no presentational benefit. But at least authors
would be slightly more likely to use them than to use attributes that
they have to re-present using extra elements or JavaScript.
We should probably aim higher than that though...
...
I'm suggesting either replacing <foo cite="url"></foo> with <bar
rel="citation" for="id-of-foo">, or dropping cite= altogether.
Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
