Comments on Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0 Working Draft 15 December 2009

Dear WG,

I'm resending my comments by E-mail because the server for the form you provide doesn't like my address (possibly because it starts with a digit, please have the tech guys correct it).

Section: 1.4
Comment title:
Persistent need for WAI-ARIA
Comment:
The section currently suggests that markup languages should evolve to include semantics covered by WAI-ARIA, only possibly slowlier. I find this expectation excessive. Designers of a markup language may deem it unnecessary to introduce all of WAI-ARIA's distinctions in the user interface into their vocabulary. XForms (see http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=8552#c12 and http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=8552#c14) and XHTML2 are good examples.
Proposed resolution:
Possible wording (assuming adjustment of some existing text):
--
Another option for the evolution of any particular host language is to keep its user interface related vocabulary minimal and streamlined for the language's purpose, letting WAI-ARIA provide finer descriptions of rendered components. This case makes persistence of the need for WAI-ARIA even more evident.
--

Section: 7.2
Comment title:
Reintroduce the http://www.w3.org/2005/07/aaa/ namespace
Comment:
Since the need for WAI-ARIA is persistent, it should obey the standard rules of good citizenship in the markup world, thus enabling generic recognition, processing and referencing (by expanded names) in markup and APIs. For XML host languages the proposed design introduces an inconsistency and sets a bad precedent. Also, since the namespace was dropped in the WDs, alternative syntactic approaches to namespaces in XML have been and still are eagerly explored with one of the main goals being to ease authoring by hand, should that be a major concern.
Proposed resolution:
Please revert to what was already there.

Best regards,

Krzysztof Maczyński
Invited Expert, HTML WG

Received on Wednesday, 3 February 2010 03:09:41 UTC