RE: DOM attributes for ARIA (was: Re: IE8 incompatibility issues)

In five years, ARIA-unaware browser share will being to approach zero.  Let's not just design for next year.

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Pieters [mailto:simonp@opera.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2008 5:27 PM
To: T.V Raman; Marc Silbey
Cc: annevk@opera.com; dave.pawson@gmail.com; w3c-wai-pf@w3.org; Chris Wilson; Cullen Sauls; jongund@uiuc.edu; aleventh@us.ibm.com; chaals@opera.com; poehlman1@comcast.net; www-archive@w3.org; schwer@us.ibm.com
Subject: DOM attributes for ARIA (was: Re: IE8 incompatibility issues)

On Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:24:37 +0100, T.V Raman <raman@google.com> wrote:

>
> As a Web developer, I would vote in favor of retaining the
> element.ariaFoo properties, and encourage other browser vendors
> to support
> that in upcoming versions. We've dropped namespace support in the
> name of developer and author convenience;

AIUI, namespace support was dropped because ARIA needed to work in HTML
and it was desired for it to be consistent syntax-wise and DOM-wise
between HTML and XML and between shipped browsers; the convenience benefit
was more of a side-effect.

    http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2008Mar/0028.html



> this falls in the same
> bucket.

Not really, IMHO.


> Writing
> e.ariaChecked = true
> is far easier than the more convoluted
> e.setAttribute(...)

It's more convenient, indeed, but:

    the attributes won't get updated properly in ARIA-unaware browsers
    (like IE7 or Safari 3) so ARIA-aware ATs can't just read the DOM and
    get the right ARIA information. AIUI, it is desirable that ARIA-aware
    ATs are able to work with ARIA-unaware browsers, and hence only
    setAttribute() should be used.

  -- http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-wai-pf/2008JanMar/0348.html


--
Simon Pieters
Opera Software