Information

Fixing HTML element references (IDREFs) on the Web
  • Upcoming
  • Tentative
  • Breakout Sessions

Meeting

Event details

Date:
– Japan Standard Time
Status:
Tentative
Location:
R08
Participants:
Matthew Atkinson, Noam Rosenthal, Lea Verou, Jeffrey Yasskin
Big meeting:
TPAC 2025 (Calendar)

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about ways that HTML element references (IDREFs) could be augmented to improve both DX and end-user experience - particularly with respect to accessibility - on the platform. A range of solutions (and problems) have been posited and proposed - but whilst there’s broad acknowledgement that there’s room for improvement, we don’t have consensus as a community on exactly what the challenges are, nor on the relative merits of various solutions that have been proposed.

Major points of contention include:

  • The nature of the DX problem or problems.

  • The costs and benefits of different solutions that have been proposed.

  • What research is needed to clarify the above, and who is best placed to carry it out.

Discussion has been happening mainly in a WHATWG thread and in a recent Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) WG call. However, two key documents to familiarise yourself with, if you are interested in attending, are:

This session aims to bring together the proposers and proponents, and accessibility people, in order to:

  • Come to agreement on how the problem could be clearly defined.

  • Dig into more details of the costs that accessibility people are concerned about - and how those costs may be more clearly articulated.

  • Arrive at some concrete actions (user research, clarification of proposals, prototyping) that could move the conversation forward by providing further data.

Agenda

Chairs:
Matthew Atkinson, Lea Verou, Jeffrey Yasskin

Description:
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about ways that HTML element references (IDREFs) could be augmented to improve both DX and end-user experience - particularly with respect to accessibility - on the platform. A range of solutions (and problems) have been posited and proposed - but whilst there’s broad acknowledgement that there’s room for improvement, we don’t have consensus as a community on exactly what the challenges are, nor on the relative merits of various solutions that have been proposed.

Major points of contention include:

  • The nature of the DX problem or problems.

  • The costs and benefits of different solutions that have been proposed.

  • What research is needed to clarify the above, and who is best placed to carry it out.

Discussion has been happening mainly in a WHATWG thread and in a recent Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) WG call. However, two key documents to familiarise yourself with, if you are interested in attending, are:

This session aims to bring together the proposers and proponents, and accessibility people, in order to:

  • Come to agreement on how the problem could be clearly defined.

  • Dig into more details of the costs that accessibility people are concerned about - and how those costs may be more clearly articulated.

  • Arrive at some concrete actions (user research, clarification of proposals, prototyping) that could move the conversation forward by providing further data.

Goal(s):
To find areas of consensus regarding: the pain points of IDREFs; the expected costs and risks from an accessibility perspective of making significant changes; the possibilities for conducting research to quantify the above.

Agenda:

  • Recap of the possible benefits

    • Improved accessibility by removing duplicate IDs

    • Improved DX by providing ways other than IDs to refer to related elements

  • Recap of the accessibility concerns

    • Authoring-time

      • Developer understanding of relative references

      • Does HTML in the wild lend itself to relative references?

    • Content maintenance

      • Stability of references / possibility for footguns

    • Browser implementation

      • Burden of implementation - reverse refs

    • Assistive Technology implementation

      • Burden of performance - changes to document

  • Discussion about what user research would be helpful

    • Quantifying the problems

      • What exactly are the pain points associated with the status quo? I.e. First, we should ask developers what they struggle with currently.

      • Does the fact that tooling provides workarounds mitigate this?

      • Is most HTML amenable to relative references?

    • Justifying the development cost through end-user need: will this make pages more accessible?

  • ...and how it might be carried out.

    • Surveys of the problems with the status quo (i.e. asking developers)

    • Recap of any results of research that has been done recently

    • Finding out who may be able to contribute to this work

Materials:

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