Structural roles for floating boxes

[essepuntato]

Premise: RASH, the Research Article in Simplified HTML format, available on github at http://github.com/essepuntato/rash, is an HTML-based markup language for scholarly articles that has been already used in academic events (e.g., SAVE-SD 2015, http://cs.unibo.it/save-sd/2015/index.html). The new version of RASH will use the structural roles defined in the Digital Publishing WAI-ARIA Module 1.0 – W3C Editor's Draft.

In RASH there exist four different kinds of floating boxes (specified through the element "figure"), i.e.: figure box, table box, formula box, and listing box. As you can image, these are used to define referenceable boxes like it happens in other document-oriented languages such as LaTeX, ODT, etc.

In the version of RASH that will publish soon, these are specified by using the following roles (still by means of the attribute @ROLE on "figure" elements): "picturebox", "tablebox", "formulabox" and "listingbox", e.g.:

<figure id="figure_1" role="picturebox">
    <p>
        <img src="img/rash.png" alt="The RASH logo!"/>
    </p>
    <figcaption>Caption of the figure.</figcaption>
</figure>

There is the possibility of adding some particular and official role in [DPub] that enables one to handle these specific structures?

Note that the disambiguation based on the content of "figure" can not hold sometimes, if, for instance, I want to express similar boxes with different kinds of contents. In RASH, that is the case of formulas, that can be expressed by means of either MathML or image, i.e.:

<figure id="formula_1" role="formulabox">
    <p>
        <img src="img/formula.png" alt="[a + b]^260 + [a + b]_i"/>
    </p>
</figure>

and

<figure id="formula_1" role="formulabox">
    <p>
        <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">
            <mrow>
                <msup>
                    <mfenced open="[" close="]">
                        <mrow>
                            <mi>a</mi>
                            <mo>+</mo>
                            <mi>b</mi>
                        </mrow>
                    </mfenced>
                    <mn>260</mn>
                </msup>
                <mo>+</mo>
                <msub>
                    <mfenced open="{" close="}">
                        <mrow>
                            <mi>a</mi>
                            <mo>+</mo>
                            <mi>b</mi>
                        </mrow>
                    </mfenced>
                    <mi>i</mi>
                </msub>
            </mrow>
        </math>
    </p>
</figure>

[TzviyaSiegman]

Editors deemed this out of scope for this module. Some of the information is conveyed by the native semantics of the child elements. For example, if a <figure> includes <ol>, native semantics convey to AT that the child element is a list. You may be interested in the loosely related issue at https://discourse.wicg.io/t/proposal-list-head-caption-title/1832/33