Re: Question about philosophy

> The ARIA spec could have a built-in list of prefixes, too, rather like
> the data-* attributes in HTML 5, where the prefix "data-" is pre-
> registered.

Right, that's not a stretch from rdfa initial context documents and their 
predefined prefixes, either, which is what epub takes advantage. There's 
always the theoretical concern that someone will be using a prefix before 
you reserve it, but it's easy spin wheels thinking about what might go 
wrong.

What we need is clarity in the ARIA spec at the same time, assuming we are 
required to move our roles off into a separate "namespace". I haven't heard 
that's a given, or widely desired, so I'm still hoping it doesn't come to 
pass.

> So it might be that some form of subclassing approach would work
> -- role="abstract.wsj"

I prefer this approach to making a mess with labels. I don't expect the 
differences in abstracts would be all that wide, and if you really need to 
express abstract.legal or, say, differentiate act.play from act.legal, that 
seems simpler than defining a new role module. It's also a lot cleaner than 
trying to remember a bunch of hyphenated labels.

There's still an issue of inheritance because of tie-in with states and 
properties, and assuming only the base class is recognized by some set of 
processors, so a mixing of labels and subclasses is maybe inevitable. I 
really don't know.

At this point, ARIA essentially only defines document structure/landmark 
roles and interactive element roles, so the concerns may be more theoretical 
than practical, too. We're not trying to replace RDFa/microdata, so many 
conflicts I've been used to seeing probably will never come to pass.

It's a fair critique that part could be a grouper of chapters, a grouper of 
sections within a structure like an index, or a generic region of the page, 
and we need to be careful of over-generalizing, but the roles we're 
suggesting generally have pretty unique meanings, even if there are slight 
differences between publishing contexts.

I think some of the concern here is also rooted in the age-old question of 
whether people bother to read specs or just use roles/element/attributes 
however they personally interpret their names. We'll never solve that 
problem.

But I'm just rambling again...

Matt

Received on Tuesday, 14 April 2015 12:23:06 UTC