>> Con: Adding a <main> element adds redundancy to the [role="main"] attribute. > I don't see why this is a con, if main is mapped to role=main in the browser it means that authors won't have to. Also adding aside/article/footer etc adds redundancy to the matching ARIA roles.
Redundancy tends to be a source of error if they get out of sync. If one browser supports [role="main"] and another supports <main>, both would be needed to provide compatibility. Obviously this is a bit contrived, as browsers supporting <main> would likely also support [role="main"], but older versions would not support <main> . Going forward, this would mean that authors wanting to use <main> would have to use <main role="main"> for backwards compatibility. yes this is true, same goes for the other new elements today. I see little issue with the redundancy though as the roles match the elements. I could be wrong on this, but I was pretty certain that <article> and the rest were supported by browsers before the ARIA roles model. no - the majority of accessibility APIs did/do not have non ARIA based roles specified for header/footer/article/aside etc some APIs are adding roles based on ARIA (Mac AX, Iaccessible2 etc) accessibility implementation in browsers for the semantics of these elements is variable [1] [1] http://www.html5accessibility.com/ regards SteveF
