Re: ARIA roles added to the a element should be conforming in HTML5.

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Leif Halvard Silli
<xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> wrote:
> Tab Atkins Jr. On 09-10-22 16.42:
>> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>>> Why should ARIA work any different from CSS?
>>>
>>> I think, in general, it only becomes difficult for authors, for spec
>>> editors
>>> - for everyone - if we mix what authors should do (semantics) with how
>>> user
>>> agents should act (parsing etc).
>>
>> Because ARIA and CSS are different things.  Why should they work
>> similarly?  ARIA is nothing than a patch to help out users of ATs when
>> authors use elements in novel ways, such as using <div>s to implement
>> sliders.  It's not meant as a general tool to be used by the average
>> author - with luck, a normal author never has to get anywhere *near*
>> ARIA, because they're using elements for what they're intended for.
>>
>> As well, it's really just more trouble than it's worth to restrict CSS
>> to only apply 'conforming' styling - the operations are too low-level
>> to sanely constrain.  ARIA, on the other hand, is a high-level tool
>> that *can* be sanely restricted.
>
> To make <h1 role="button"> non-conforming *is* to restrict how it can be
> used and *is* to treat ARIA different from CSS.

Indeed, I think it should be treated differently.  Making it
non-conforming is one step in that.

> The only likeness between CSS and ARIA that I suggested, is that ARIA should
> over-rule the default semantics, the same way that CSS should overrule
> default styling.

I still don't see why this should be allowed.  Just use the closest
proper element.

Philip` pointed me to some of his raw data, at
http://philip.html5.org/data/role-attributes-raw.txt, which is very
helpful.  This is every usage of @role across 425k pages.  Scanning
the list, you find only a handful of uses which are ARIA-related, and
none of them are gross mispurposings of default element semantics.

~TJ