HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
</section>
<section>
<h2>Latest multimedia</h2>
...
</section>
On the website (but not in the screenshot), there are also a cou-
ple more
<nav>
blocks (“Trending,” “Campaigns and investiga-
tions”) and a “fat footer” that, as we saw in Chapter 1, should be
a couple of page-wide
<nav>
blocks outside the “real”
<footer>
that contains the usual privacy, terms and conditions, and acces-
sibility information.
And there it is, ladies and gentlemen: an HTML5 version of
www.guardian.co.uk
.
Like any other exercise in markup above
the level of the trivial, there are legitimate differences of opinion.
That's OK. HTML is a general language, so there aren't elements
for every specific occasion. Choose the most appropriate ele-
ment for the job and be consistent when marking up similar con-
tent throughout the site.
The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative's Accessible Rich Internet
Applications suite (WAI-ARIA) is an independent spec that “plugs
the holes” in HTML 4 (or any other markup language) to help
make web applications and web pages more accessible.
Imagine that you have scripted a slider control. In HTML 4 there
is no native slider, so you just have some HTML elements (an
<input>
, some images) with some JavaScript attached to act and
look like a slider. There is no way to tell the operating system
that the role of this widget is a slider and what its current state
and value are. If the operating system doesn't know that vital
information, assistive technology such as a screen reader can't
convey it to the user either.
ARIA aims to bridge this situation by introducing a whole series
of new attributes that browsers and assistive technologies can
hook into.
NoTE
If you start using
these new ARIA attributes,
you may notice that your
HTML 4 pages won't validate
anymore. As long as the rest
of your markup is OK, that
doesn't matter—accessibility
trumps validity. The ARIA attri-
butes won't cause any kind of
DOM weirdness or cause any
malfunction in browsers—like
with CSS rules, they're just
ignored if they're not
understood.
