Re: [PATCH 0/8] Make generated HTML more accessible

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hello Anna,

thank you for sending your patches.
I agree that accessibility is an important goal.

Anna wrote on Tue, Jun 21, 2022 at 05:27:41PM +0500:

> For reference:
> * https://www.w3.org/TR/dpub-aria-1.1/
> * https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/

These documents are extremely long (which is unfortunately the case
for many other W3C documents too, and which is a common effect of
design by committee in general).  An unfortunate consequence is that
i will have to read them selectively, and even that may take time.

Three other goals of the mandoc project, in addition to accessibility,
are (1) simplicity, (2) standard conformance, and (3) consistency.
There are more goals, like correctness, robustness, security etc., but
those matter less in the present context.

These goals have a number fo implications:

 - (1) simplicity means that i do not want to add redundant
       or unnecessarily long markup.  For example, i would not
       want to add ARIA properties if the HTML element used
       already implies the role, or can be changed to imply the
       role.  As another example, when adding a new wrapper
       element for ARIA purposes, i would want to check whether
       the immediately surrounding, adjacent, or contained
       elements can be simplified.  From a brief review, i
       suspect that your patches are already quite good in this
       respect, but i want to check such aspects for every change.

 - (2) standard conformance is in particular related to
       https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/ section 1.4
       Co-Evolution.  I want both HTML elements and properties
       and ARIA properties used as standardized, but i fear
       there may still be places where elements are abused
       and more standard-conforming elements can be chosen.
       So whenever changing an element, i want to check the
       immediate vicinity for conformance.

 - (3) consistency implies that if one technique is chosen -
       respecting simplicity and conformance as described above -
       at one place, then it should be used throughout for the
       respective mdoc(7) or man(7) macro or for the respective
       HTML element.  This is particularly important for
       languages that are as large as HTML, CSS, and ARIA:
       They usually provide several different ways to achieve
       a similar effect, and unless consistency is taken very
       seriously, markup chaos typically ensues.

For these reasons, i never accept patch series.

Instead, i will consider each patch separately.
Let's see how that goes.

One final question:
Do you have a good way for testing?
Is there a difference in the diff in the amount of effort for:
1. testing an uncommitted diff
2. testing a committed diff
3. testing a diff deployed to man.openbsd.org ?

Yours,
  Ingo
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