Re: conformance checker for HTML+ARIA?

On Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:19:35 +0200, Steven Faulkner  
<faulkner.steve@gmail.com> wrote:

> There has been some discussion [1] on WAI-xtech about HTML+ARIA
> validator/conformance checker
>
> david dorward wrote:
>
> The HTML Working Group is chartered to "maintain and produce incremental
> revisions to the HTML specification"[1], which I would imagine HTML 4.01
> + ARIA would fall under. I imagine you would raise the matter with them
> and see if they would be willing to work with the WAI to publish a small
> Recommendation which makes reference to ARIA and HTML 4.01, defines a
> Doctype and includes a DTD.

Some things to keep in mind when doing this:

   * Minting new XHTML FPIs is not popular among browser vendors.
   * Minting new HTML FPIs will force documents that use it to be in
     "standards mode". This is probably not a showstopper but might be
     annoying for authors who are currently in quirks mode or almost
     standards mode and want to add ARIA and validate.

I think it would be better for both browser vendors and authors if there's  
a way for authors to use the legacy doctypes. For instance,  
validator.w3.org could have a checkbox that enables ARIA support for any  
of HTML4 and XHTML 1.x.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software