Success Criterion 4.1.1 Parsing

WCAG 2.2 Parsing — the Success Criterion that didn’t make it

Success Criterion (SC) 4.1.1 Parsing will be deprecated in WCAG 2.2. Why, and what does it mean?

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In my last article, I wrote about the new Success Criteria (SC) that W3C introduced into WCAG 2.2. But, there was one SC that didn’t make the cut: SC 4.1.1 Parsing.

What was SC 4.1.1 Parsing again?

Success Criterion (SC) 4.1.1 was introduced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in WCAG 2.0. Here’s the current text from WCAG 2.1:

In content implemented using markup languages, elements have complete start and end tags, elements are nested according to their specifications, elements do not contain duplicate attributes, and any IDs are unique, except where the specifications allow these features.

This SC was a Level A Criterion, meaning that it was required for WCAG compliance.

Practically speaking, it required the following:

• “Well-formed” markup. For example, an opening <section> tag had to have a corresponding </section> closing tag.
• Proper nesting of elements
• Any id attribute value on a page had to be unique
• Elements could not contain duplicate attributes. So, a <p> element could not have two class attributes

For example, the following would pass SC 4.1.1:

<section id="contactInfo">
<h2>Contact us:</h2>
<ul>
<li style="color:#A5A; text-decoration:underline">Phone: (123) 456-7890</li>
<li>Email: <a href="mailto:someone@help.com">someone@help.com</a></li>
<li>Carrier Pigeon: Coo three times facing north</li>
</ul>
</section>

But this would not pass:

<section id="contactInfo">
<h2 id="contactInfo">Contact us:
<ul>
<li style="color:#A5A" style="text-decoration:underline">Phone: (123) 456-7890</li>
<li>Email: <a href=mailto:someone@help.com>someone@help.com</a>
<li>Carrier Pigeon: Coo three times facing north</li></li>
</ul>

Here’s what’s wrong with the second example:

• There is no closing…