Should the 'row' role really be necessary for parents of 'gridcell' and other cell role elements?

[turjmner8]

Discussed in https://github.com/w3c/aria/discussions/2128

^{Originally posted by turjmner8 February 22, 2024} In general, would it be possible to remove the requirement for role 'gridcell' elements to be contained within role 'row' elements in a future spec? Newer DOM approaches like CSS grid are available to simplify the construction of grid structures that do not really support having a row-like element wrap all the given 'cell' elements of a logical row. Additionally, it's not quite clear to me how someone would be able to construct a 'row' role compliant grid for cases where cells span multiple rows without using TR elements, which introduces other sizing issues that do not exist when using more modern DIV / CSS strategies.

It seems like aria-rowindex, aria-colindex, etc... on 'gridcell' role elements themselves should be enough to convey what logical row and column a given 'gridcell' element belongs to even if its parent was a 'grid' role element rather than an additional 'row' role element.

I may be missing some nuance here, but the only thing that seems a little unclear would be not being able to set aria-selected on the containing 'row' element if row selection is supported. In general, it also feels like selections when dealing with tables/grids could also benefit from some enhancements though (how to tell if a row vs column vs individual cell is selected for example). Specifying aria-selected on 'row' role elements vs 'gridcell' role elements does not seem to make much of a difference in current screen reader impls (NVDA, JAWS, voiceover, etc...)

Thanks for any feedback / info here.