Should <dir> behave like a list element?

[annevk]

Only Gecko seems to render http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/?%3Cdir%3E%3Cli%3Etest%3Cdir%3E%3Cli%3Etest as HTML asks for.

That makes me think that at this point it's probably more web compatible to not do that.

https://w3c.github.io/html-aam/ also doesn't map it to role=list it seems.

cc @zcorpan @mfreed7

[Yay295]

https://w3c.github.io/html-aam/ also doesn't map it to role=list it seems.

That page doesn't seem to mention the <dir> element at all.

[scottaohara]

Deprecated/obsolete features aren't listed in HTML AAM. In this case, the element was deprecated/made obsolete years before AAM was created. I could add those into the spec, but with rare exceptions like the dir element (where it says it should be treated like a UL, so it should be mapped to role=list), many of these features will have no useful mappings for accessibility.

[nt1m]

@Ahmad-S792 recently made the rendering match the spec / Firefox in WebKit/WebKit@5febb62

[zcorpan]

The visual impact of alternating the marker for nested lists is likely inconsequential since dir is rarely used and nested and unstyled dir is likely extremely rare.

Running a query of 1% of httparchive I found 7 pages using dir (so ~0.005% of pages, which is similar to ~0.007% in Web Almanac 2022), for example this one uses it in the sidebar menu without author styles (no nested dirs): http://www.americantoymarbles.com/

Mapping to role=list seems like it would be an improvement for this page at least. WebKit has heuristics for ul, which I suppose could apply equally to dir.

Query

Total number of pages is 12,890,459; this runs on a 1% sample subset.

SELECT
  *
FROM (
  SELECT
    page,
    ARRAY_LENGTH(REGEXP_EXTRACT_ALL(body, r'(?i)(<dir(?:\s|>))')) AS dir_count
  FROM
    `httparchive.response_bodies.2023_04_01_desktop` TABLESAMPLE SYSTEM (1 PERCENT)
  WHERE
    page = url )
WHERE
  dir_count > 0
  ORDER BY dir_count DESC

Result

page,dir_count
http://www.americantoymarbles.com/,5
http://poemasguay.blogspot.com/,2
http://www.1960sflashback.com/,2
http://www.saikaleshwaritravels.com/,1
http://wtcbarcelonaevents.com/,1
http://www.evlm.stuba.sk/,1
https://holzteilchen.de/,1

[annevk]

I guess I don't care strongly which way this goes. Aligning everything with the HTML Standard, including HTML AAM, works too.

[zcorpan]

Filed w3c/html-aam#486