Combobox pattern: Use of "owns" is unclear

[dusek]

The WAI-ARIA section of the Combo Box patter (3.7) refers to the term "owns" in two places:

The element with role combobox contains or owns a textbox element that has either role textbox or role searchbox.

and

When the combobox popup is visible, the combobox element contains or owns an element that has role listbox, tree, grid, or dialog.

However it is not clear what the term "owns" means (at least it was not clear to me when I was first reading the passages). Perhaps aria-owns is meant.

I seems that the same issue might be present also in 3.13 and 3.24.

[mcking65]

@dusek, thank you for this feedback. The phrasing is used frequently. It does mean aria-owns. It is typically clarified in the notes in the pattern. I understand how it can be confusing.

We will discuss ways of improving the language. One problem is that we do not yet have a section of guidance for the aria-owns property to reference. Drafting that guidance is issue #75. We may have to complete that issue before resolving this.

[dusek]

@mcking65 Thanks, I understand. Now after reading more of the authoring practices, I too would now understand "owns" implicitly as meaning "aria-owns".

To provide context, I filed the bug when I was reading the practices for the first time, what is more I jumped directly to the combo box pattern (because that was the pattern I needed). So I was not yet aware of how often aria-owns (and more generally the "DOM-contained or aria-owned" phrase in its various phrasings) is used similarly in other places, and the wording "owned" therefore seemed unclear to me as to what it exactly means.