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WICG
Document Subtitle
Introduction
Installed web apps cannot provide dynamic/controllable contextual information in their title bar. Contextual information can be the name of an open document, the section of an app or any other information that can be relevant to the running installed Web app. Having this information in the title bar can be useful to identify the open window when selecting among open apps in surfaces like the Alt+Tab action on Windows (and similar actions on macOS and Linux to jump between open apps).
Feedback
I welcome feedback in this thread, but encourage you to file bugs against the Explainer.
Also, whether a tab is playing audio! There's usually a little glyph of a loudspeaker appended to the title text of the browser tab.
One issue I have run into is when there is a need to include structure in the title text. To my knowledge, the title permits only plain text. If the document title has (e.g.) more than one language, then there is no way to express this. (Violation of WCAG SC 3.1.2: Language of Parts).
In other words, this doesn't work:
<title>Lesson 2: The three genders in German: <span lang="de">der, die, das</span></title>
Ideally, a screen reader should choose German phonemes to announce the span marked up as German language, but the definition of <title> in the HTML spec precludes this.
However, I think that some of this contextual information does not really belong to the title, rather it belongs to the document. Perhaps the way to go is to expose the document metadata somehow, rather than piggybacking on the title?
