aria-controls a required property for Combobox?

[cpandhi]

As per the ARIA 1.1 spec it states that the aria-controls a required properties for Combobox but technically the aria-controls is a required property on the textbox, the input element as shown in the example. Can you please clarify?
<div aria-label="Tag" role="combobox" aria-expanded="true" aria-owns="owned_listbox" aria-haspopup="listbox> <input type="text" aria-autocomplete="list" aria-controls="owned_listbox" aria-activedescendant="selected_option"></div>

[carmacleod]

There was some discussion about this in #716

[mcking65]

Charu, you are right that the location of the aria-controls requirement in the properties table for combobox is a potential problem, especially for tools that automatically derive requirements by parsing the taxonomy. As described in issue #716, the required location of aria-controls on the textbox is clearly spelled out in the descriptive text for the combobox role.

The spec doesn't give us a great way of handling situations like this. The alternative would be a conditional statement in the properties table for the textbox role. For role textbox, we could add aria- controls as a required property with the added condition "if the textbox is a descendant of an element with role combobox". I don't know if that is preferable.

I suspect @joanmarie may have a strong opinion about whether that alternative is better.

[zcorpan]

#1051 is merged.