aria roles and marking up important content

[Joseph Scheuhammer]

Clayton wrote:

> only one thing in a doc is supposed to be tagged "main", so that's not 
> very flexible
> but lots of things can be tagged "complementary"

Yes, but multiple regions of a page can have a @role="document" (see:  
http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria/#document).  The "main" landmark role 
conceptually lies within a document.  And, yes, there can be only one 
"main" per "document".

Now, what t spawned the "document" role was the need for a contrasting 
"application" role.  The latter was to cue the assistive technology that 
normal document navigation controls were not to be used.  The way users 
navigate an application (think:  a collection of GUI widgets) is 
different from the way they navigate straight document content (think:  
headers, paragraphs, blockquotes, and so on).   Furthermore, it was 
expected that a page can sometimes be a mixture of document and 
application regions.  The different roles allow the AT to switch 
navigation modes.

I can't see any reason against having nothing but document regions on a 
page, but one might wonder why the need for multiple document regions if 
everything on the page is a document.  Then again, this may be the use 
case:  where the page is a set of related documents where each could 
stand on its own, apart from the rest.

Have to think about that a bit more.

-- 
;;;;joseph

'What did one snowman say to the other snowman?'
             - "Adrift", D. Hume -