Consider to remove aria-haspopup
afercia opened this issue · comments
Hello. Happy to see you're focusing in developing accessible components. Thanks for this 🙂
I'm not sure aria-haspopup is used properly though.
aria-haspopup is a property, not a state. It's meant to indicate if an element has a popup that appears on some user activation, regardless of the popup visibility. In other words, when there's a popup, it should always be true even when the popup is not displayed. Worth nothing with ARIA 1.1 (still a Candidate Recommendation), things will change a bit and there will be more values available.
Additionally, unless I'm missing something, worth considering a combobox shouldn't have an aria-haspopup property at all. Unfortunately, the related section on the ARIA Authoring Practices is under some re-work https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/#combobox and they point to the related GitHub issue: w3c/aria-practices#31
From there, you can refer to the sections that were temporarily removed (https://rawgit.com/w3c/aria-practices/master/aria-practices-DeletedSectionsArchive.html#combobox) and also to the section with general considerations about popups and drop-downs:
5.4 Popups and drop-downs
https://rawgit.com/w3c/aria-practices/master/aria-practices-DeletedSectionsArchive.html#relations_haspopup
where it's clearly stated:
Combo boxes, or drop down lists, work differently. Controls with the role combobox must contain a list of items that can be opened, usually as a drop-down. Because this is intrinsic to the functionality of a combo box, it does not need to be explicitly indicated with aria-haspopup.
@afercia Thanks a lot for such a thorough research!
Out of interest, I checked what other popular websites do, and found that:
- Google - implements
aria-haspopupwithtrue/falsevalues, like we do inreact-autowhatever. - Bing and usa.gov - implement
aria-haspopupwhich is alwaystrue, which supports your theory that it's a property, not a state. - Ebay - implements
aria-haspopupwhich is alwaysfalse, which seems weird. - Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter- don't implement
aria-haspopup, which supports your theory that it can be removed.
I wonder why Google decided to implement it this way. Any ideas?
I wonder why Google decided to implement it this way. Any ideas?
@moroshko honestly I have no idea 🙂 My only (wild) guess is maybe some years ago the whole combobox pattern wasn't supported so well and adding an aria-haspopup was used as sort of fallback to communicate something appeared on the page.
For sure, it's not a state: it's a property and its value shouldn't change.
Worth noting in the new ARIA 1.1 (still a Candidate Recommendation) things are a bit different and aria-haspopup will have some new values including "listbox". However, a combobox already has an implicit aria-haspopup property so it shouldn't be explicitly set, see:
https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-1.1/#combobox
Elements with the role combobox have an implicit aria-haspopup value of listbox.
@afercia Cool, let's remove aria-haspopup then.
Mind creating a PR?
@moroshko Hi!
Did I understand correctly that it should be just deleted?
yeah
Done.