(Editorial) comment on ARIA PR

Michael,

there was a great presentation at a workshop this week on the usage of ARIA at
an educational publishing workshop; this prompted me to read the WAI-ARIA spec:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/PR-wai-aria-20140206/

I found, however, an editorial issue that, I think, should be dealt with before
publishing it as a Rec.

In the role model section:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/PR-wai-aria-20140206/roles

there is a repeated sentence describing values for properties:

  "Any valid RDF object reference, such as a URI or an RDF ID reference."

I am afraid this should be changed overall. The fundamental problem is that 'RDF
ID reference' is _not_ an RDF concept. It is a (very!) unfortunate term used in
a particular serialization of RDF, namely RDF/XML. @ID in an RDF/XML file is
really identical to when @id is used in HTML: it defines a (fragment) URI. But
this shorthand does not exists in, for example, the Turtle or JSON serialization
of RDF.

What you really want to say, I guess, is that the value is an IRI or a blank
node (ie, not a literal). Your current specification, actually, does not refer
to a blank node, so I guess it becomes very simple: the value of that property
is an IRI. That is it. (And it is in line with the fact that all those
properties are defined as object properties in the RDF vocabulary file.)

(I realize you refer to URI-s and not IRI-s in the spec. I do not know if it is
an issue if you exchange that to IRI; if it is, you can probably ignore it and
use URI-s)

B.t.w., the RDF WG plans to publish the new version of the RDF Concepts and
Syntax and the RDF Schema documents on February 25. This means that you should
probably change the references to:

RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax, eds, Richard Cyganiak, David Wood, and
Markus Lanthaler, http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-rdf11-concepts-20140225/

and

RDF Schema 1.1, eds Dan Brickley, R.V. Guha,
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-rdf-schema-20140225/

in the final document.

I owe you an apology not to have looked at this before. But I think the changes
I propose are purely editorial (you may want to check this with the Director) so
there should be no problem making this change for the Rec.

Thanks

Ivan

-- 
Ivan Herman, W3C
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