aria-practices VS WHATWG HTML Standard

W3C Aria Practices

I should apologize off-the-bat for not digging in too deeply, but how does this handle keyboard and screenreader accessibility?

W3C has some in-depth list of expected keyboard interactions, though I'm not sure how complete they are:

https://w3c.github.io/aria-practices/#TreeView

https://w3c.github.io/aria-practices/examples/treeview/treev...

I ask because I've tried to implement a [TreeGrid](https://w3c.github.io/aria-practices/#treegrid) myself before and... it's a lot of work. I'd love an accessible, keyboard-friendly React tree :).

Yep I totally agree with this.

There are however a bunch of ARIA tags & best practices etc (https://w3c.github.io/aria-practices/) that exist to make popups and dialogs (and other things e.g. tree views or "email-inbox-style" "treegrids" etc) accessible (if implemented correctly).

I am conflicted about these - it is nice that there are ARIA tags for this, but it would also be nice if browsers "understood" aria tags and added some default behaviors (e.g. keyboard navigation). As it is, ARIA tags are essentially "pointless" to anyone who doesn't use an assistive technology, and so non-assitive-technology users nor developers benefit from using ARIA tags so they are often forgotten. If the browsers saw that there was an A11y-tree that matched a treeview or a treegrid, it would be really really nice if they applied some default common keyboard navigation implementation, rather than do nothing and leave it up to the developer to decide what keys do what on each and every site. .... Or on the other hand, is that too prescriptive and should we give developers and UX designers more leeway to design something better, rather than rely on browser-enforced defaults? I guess we are happy with browser defaults for basic inputs, but would we be for a treegrid?

The ARIA practices GitHub is a good resource to see where certain patterns fall short.

WHAT-WG HTML

There's a long-standing WHATWG feature request open for it here: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/2791

And several userland custom element implementation, like https://www.npmjs.com/package//html-include-element

One of the cool things that you can do with client-side includes and shadow DOM is render the included HTML into a shadow root that has s, so that the child content of the include element is slotted into a shell implemented by the included HTML.

This lets you do things like have the main page be the pre-page content and the included HTML be a heavily cached site-wide shell, and then another per-user include with personalized HTML - all cached appropriately.

The `allow` attribute on iframes is a relatively recent API addition from 2017

https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/3287

I think there's a pretty strong argument at this point for this kind of replacing DOM with a response behavior being part of the platform.

I think the first step would be an element that lets you load external content into the page declaratively. There's a spec issue open for this: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/2791

And my custom element implementation of the idea: https://www.npmjs.com/package/html-include-element

Then HTML could support these elements being targets of links.

> Consider https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt vs https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/

I thought, oh, that's not so bad. Then I realized what I was looking at was a 10 page index.

I'd love to see something like HTMX get standardized, but I'm extremely pessimistic for HTMX's prospects for standardization in HTML.

In talking to a few standards folks about it, they've all said, "oh, yeah, you want declarative AJAX; people have tried and failed to get that standardized for years." Even just trying to get

to target a section of the page that isn't an has been argued about and hashed out for years.<p>Why is that? Well, for example, here's the form you have to fill out to start standardizing a front-end feature. <a href="https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/new?assignees=&labels=addition%2Fproposal%2Cneeds+implementer+interest&projects=&template=1-new-feature.yml">https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/new?assignees=&labels=...</a><p>It asks three main questions:<p>* What problem are you trying to solve?

The issue with a single global event handler is discussed here: https://github.com/WICG/close-watcher#a-single-event

If you use popover="", you get the kind of functionality you're discussing for free. For

, the discussion is in progress and reaching a conclusion: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/9373