Re: Meeting with SVG, XHTML, WAI people to move forward on ARIA as a cross cutting technology

Rich Schwerdtfeger
Distinguished Engineer, SWG Accessibility Architect/Strategist
Chair, IBM Accessibility Architecture Review  Board
blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/schwer

public-html-request@w3.org wrote on 10/18/2007 06:21:08 AM:

>
> On Oct 18, 2007, at 01:05, Ian Hickson wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 17 Oct 2007, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> >> On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:44:31 +0200, Richard Schwerdtfeger
> >> <schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Net: Due to special treatment of the hyphen and colon characters
> >>> in IE
> >>> we agreed that it would be best to focus on using underscore. Doug
> >>> will be discussing this with the SVG working group.
> >>>
> >>> So, use aria_checked as opposed to aria-checked or aria:checked
> >>
> >> Internet Explorer doesn't treat the hyphen specially. I think the
> >> argument was that it was better to avoid the hyphen because it is
> >> already used in other attribute names (such as color-rendering).
>
> Right. Doug's opposition to the hyphen had nothing to do with IE compat.
>
Right. Doug's opposition to hyphen was SVG related. The IE compat. problem
was related to colon.

> > Wouldn't that be an argument in _favour_ of the hyphen?
>
> Depends on whom you ask and whether you are trying to find a naming
> scheme for grouping the ARIA attributes in a way that makes sense for
> a group of attributes in HTML and SVG or whether you are trying to
> generalize a new namespacing mechanism.
>
> I think we should figure out a clean way to do ARIA in particular and
> not to try to establish a new generalized namespacing mechanism.
>
> Like I said on the telecon, the technical compatibility properties of
> the naming scheme and the spec organization are not the same thing.
> HTML and SVG can delegate the definition of ARIA attributes to a
> separate ARIA spec in the case of aria:*, aria-* and aria_*. These
> specs could well advance at their own pace. SVG doesn't need to
> "adopt" "like 70 attributes"[1]. All the SVG WG would need to do is
> to agree to set aside the aria-* names and say that they are
> specified in the ARIA spec. Versioning is a red herring. We don't
> need a single declared version number that covers the combined frozen
> state of both the base language and ARIA. Moreover, versioning
> arguments in general are a distraction. Versioning assumes that spec
> writers are free to make incompatible changes and use a new version
> number as an excuse. The better way to address this problem is to
> constrain spec writers not to break compatibility and doing away with
> versioning. We shouldn't assume that ARIA 2.0 breaks compatibility
> with ARIA 1.0. In fact, I think the Web will be better off if the
> specifiers of ARIA 2.0 feel they have an obligation to stay
> compatible with ARIA 1.0.
>

agreed.

> Like I also said on the telecon, I prefer the hyphen over the
> underscore. However, I conceded that as far as DOM and CSS
> compatibility goes, the choice between the two doesn't make a
> technical difference (whereas using the colon does). This doesn't
> make them equally good, though. The hyphen is better from from the
> point of view of keyboard ergonomics as well as from the point of
> view of the aesthetic and consistency considerations pertaining to
> language design.
>
> Doug wants[1] to generalize a new namespacing convention that not to
> collide with the existing attribute name grouping conventions of SVG
> but avoids the problems of Namespaces in XML. I think the underscore
> makes sense if that's the problem you are solving, but I disagree
> with the premise. I don't think we should be solving that problem
> here. (I am not convinced we should solve it at all.) Instead of
> creating a new generic namespacing convention, we should be
> introducing ARIA into HTML and SVG (but spec-wise do it by normative
> reference). In that case, it makes perfect sense for the ARIA
> attributes to start with aria-*, stroke attributes to start with
> stroke-* and repetition attributes to start with repeat-*.
>
underscore works fine too and we don't run into the hyphen problem in SVG.

> > ...adding a fifth would make the language even more confusing,
>
> Indeed.
>
> > though the first form is used for groups of related attributes like
> > the repeat-* attributes in WF2, and would thus make sense for the
> > aria-* group of attributes).
>
> Indeed.
>
> > Also the underscore looks really ugly. :-)
>
> Also, it is harder to write with the usual input methods.
>
> [1] http://www.schepers.cc/?p=46
> --
> Henri Sivonen
> hsivonen@iki.fi
> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
>
>
>