Re: ARIA Proposal

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:04:39 +0200, Richard Schwerdtfeger  
<schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> Simon's proposal does not mention stating the set of roles as a fallback
> mechanism sequence. That needs to be handled elsewhere. I am also worried
> that having multiple roles as you stated (for fallbacks) will make things
> more complicated for authors.

It does deal with it though. I don't think it makes things more  
complicated for authors. They are already familiar with this concept as it  
is very similar to how CSS works, for instance:

   font-family:Arial, sans-serif;

It is also way simpler than what the PFWG has introduced for fallback.  
Namely using RDF at the end of a role URI to indicate what the fallback  
role is. (Which the UA has to fetch, etc.) If having a fallback scenario  
is indeed a requirement this seems like the simplest solution to solve it.


> Back to the forking issue:
>
> You know that the role module does not actually say what the user agent
> should do with the role attribute. Even if it were a qname you could just
> treat the role as a string and pass it off to the AT. So, from an AT
> interoperability piece it really is a situation where we say treat it as  
> a string:
>
> flowchart:decision
>
> for example.

That seems totally wrong as foobar:decision and flowchart:decision can  
totally mean the same thing per the definition of role (in so far there is  
one).


> If middelware wants to use the role qname for some other purpose should  
> the browser really care? For example, Mark Birbeck uses roles to do  
> semantic
> processing of the document. That does not impact the browser.

As I explained and illustrated with an example above it would impact the  
browser. It also makes things confusing for authors as the document  
conformance criteria would probably have to cover all those cases. It  
seems unwise to overload role in this way.


> At one point a document was created in the W3C to state how the browsers
> support HTML DOM. As HTML 5 progresses we do the same thing here. For now
> if it is not one of the standard aria or xhtml roles (no namespace  
> required per the proposal) we treat it as a string or we can follow the  
> fallback
> mechanism below.
>
> So, are we making too much of this?

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Wednesday, 10 October 2007 14:56:15 UTC