Re: role="" attribute

This sounds very reasonable and definitely asks for a "why not?" answer.

Without engaging in an ad hominem "attack" I would like to know why Bro.
Hickson uses "ascii art" in his sig line. To those of us steeped in a
tradition of battling inaccessibility, even within our own ranks, it is
tantamount to flying the Confederate Battle Flag over a State Capitol
building. Almost quixotic, but still offensive.

At one time it was specifically prohibited in our Guidelines, but now it's
just lumped with other abuses of "text" - we often rail against having
"image text" and here we have "text image" without
excuse/purpose/explanation.

Love.

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:47 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

>
> ARIA has a lot of attributes, all but one of which are prefixed with the
> string "aria-". Is there any chance we could also prefix role="" with
> "aria-", as in aria-role=""? I understand that in some host languages, the
> attribute has other purposes as well, but it would be useful if, in the
> host languages where that isn't the case, the attribute was prefixed. It
> would keep all the attributes together in indexes and tables in
> implementations, it would make it easier for authors to see their
> accessibility API work, and it would highlight the link between the
> various attributes. It would also allow ARIA to be used in vocabularies
> that already have a role="" attribute (aria-* attributes are far less
> likely to already exist than role="").
>
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>
>