Re: ARIA States and Properties Meeting

Richard Schwerdtfeger wrote:

> 2. Colon is not an option for text/html
> We cannot use the colon instead of a hyphen, because a colon in 
> attribute names causes problems in IE. For example, you cannot use CSS 

Interestingly, though, IE is the strongest precedent for using : as as
namespace separator in documents served as text/html.  It is used for 
VML and for the Microsoft Office supplementary markup.

> attribute selectors in IE when using a colon in the attribute name. Use 

Firstly, I don't actually see complaints that VML and Office markup is 
causing a problem in this respect, but also, I was under the impression 
that IE still didn't have strong support for attribute value based 
selectors (I've not seen them used in mainstream web site CSS), which I 
would have thought would be necessary for ARIA attributes to be useful 
in CSS.  It could be an issue for scripting.

> 
> *6. Currently proposed solutions for ARIA states and properties (not role)*
> A. Use hyphenated property everywhere .
> Pros: consistent
> Cons: The issue that has been raised on this is that SVG already has 
> properties with hyphens in it. However, proponents of hyphen state that 
> SVG has no properties starting with "aria-" so it is not a real problem, 

This means that either ARIA attributes have to be part of the core of 
XHTML, SVG, etc., or that you have the ugly situation of having two 
different syntaxes for namespacing co-exist, one of which is only 
available to official standards, because it cannot guarantee global 
uniqueness otherwise.

> D. For long term consideration: Should the W3C consider create a 
> collection of cross-cutting attributes which may be used across 
> renderable markup languages without namespaces. e.g. (Role, ARIA, RDF/A, 
> etc.)

For the long term, shouldn't one be assuming that text/html browsers 
will support XML namespace notation in CSS; the major one already 
supports it in the HTML.  (Or that the world will move to XML - although 
it is looking less and less likely that that will happen.)

[ This may fail or be delayed on lists other than www-svg. ]

-- 
David Woolley
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Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2007 07:02:24 UTC