Re: role cardinality [was: Re: ARIA Proposal ]

Hi Anne,

On Oct 1, 2007, at 3:06 PM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

>
> (trimmed cc list)
>
> On Mon, 01 Oct 2007 21:36:37 +0200, Richard Schwerdtfeger  
> <schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>> Thanks. The tricky thing is that XHTML 1.x modularization also  
>> uses the
>> same http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace. So, when we introuce  
>> aria-
>> properties for xhtml serialization they also show up there. So,  
>> there is
>> serialization for html and then the xhtml modularization work .  
>> How is that coordinated?
>
> Seems like an issue for W3C management to solve. (Personally I've  
> always wondered why the HTML WG did not automatically inherit all  
> documents that dealt with the XHTML namespace, but so be it.) This  
> issue was raised before when it became evident that the XHTML2 WG  
> might be using the XHTML namespace for XHTML 2.0, but no decision  
> has been made as far as I can tell. As far as most browser vendors  
> are concerned this is all highly theoretical though last time I  
> checked as none of them has any intentions of implementing XHTML 2.0.
>
> (I think the XHTML Modularization is not for implementors, but for  
> specification writers, although this is not entirely clear to me.  
> Another thing is that it builds on top of HTML 4.01, which is being  
> revised by the HTML WG.)

I don't think any of us know the intentions of any of the browser  
vendors and I'm not sure its relevant to the discussion. For the  
proprietary vendors, most of them have policies that they will not  
make forward looking pronouncements about products. For the open  
source projects, they're much too de-centered to determine what will  
happen. You may have knowledge about Opera, though I suspect you may  
have even been required to sign an NDA for Opera as well. The point  
then is that such pronouncements are not at all helpful to our  
discussions here.,

Back on topic, I think there's no reason that we cannot cooperate and  
share the XHTML namespace. It may require coordination, but it could  
certainly b e possible. I also think it would be helpful to cooperate  
with the various role attribute working groups to see whether we can  
count on  their cooperation in making role an integral part of the  
XHTML namespace. For example, we might get a commitment from both  
workgroups to only use the 'role[ name for an attribute (never adding  
any other attribute or element name to the namespace). Then there is  
no danger of name collisions even though multiple WGs are adding  
names to the same namespace (i.e., aRole and ARIA-role WGs would only  
create names for role attribute values and nothing else). Similarly,  
we can work with the XHTML WG to ensure that we both develop our  
respective parts of the XHTML namespace without any collisions. This  
should not be hard to accomplish.

Take care,
Rob

Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2007 05:32:00 UTC