Re: conformance checker for HTML+ARIA?

On Sep 30, 2008, at 15:42, Bruce Lawson wrote:

>> It doesn't resolve the whole issue of ensuring that ARIA is used
>> correctly with a native markup language, but if the ARIA  
>> specification
>> is available in a machine readable format [...] we could build a  
>> basic
>> validator to ensure at least the ARIA part is used according to its
>> specification.
>
> Most authors would be using it with HTML - so that would be a good  
> start. There are several options:
>
> 1)  an HTML validator that simply ignores any ARIA information - so  
> it doesn't conformance check the ARIA at all, but doesn't fail a  
> page because ARIA is present. (That's useful for knowledgeable early  
> adopters who have an organisational policy that requires valid  
> markup. Perhaps they are committed to WCAG AA which "requires"  
> validity, for example).
>
> So perhaps it throws a warning ("please check the syntax and  
> applicability of the ARIA attributes you use") but no error.

You can't get further than this using a DTD-based validator.

> 2) an HTML validator that also syntax-checks ARIA attributes to make  
> sure it's used according to its spec
>
> 3) a full validator that ensures ARIA is used correctly with the  
> native markup language. I believe this is impossible now as there  
> are issues about how to specify this.
>
> So (3) is impossible, (2) would  be very useful, although the spec  
> might change, while (1) could be built now, and at least removes  
> impediments to adoption, even it isn't "helping".


Validator.nu is doing the impossible #3 by making up stuff that isn't  
in the specs (yet?).

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/