Re: ARIA States and Properties Meeting

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:02:03 +0200, David Woolley  
<forums@david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:
> 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.

Which is why it's a good reason to not overload that even more with  
something that would work differently. Also, the idea of ARIA is that it  
can be used in existing content without the need for browsers to implement  
enhancements. Introducing a namespaced syntax in HTML defeats that  
requirement.


>> 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.

They work fine in my copy of Internet Explorer 7. (Well, except for the  
noted issue with colons.)


>>  *6. Currently proposed solutions for ARIA states and properties (not  
>> role)*
>> A. Use hyphenated property everywhere .
>
> 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.

We don't want to introduce namespacing in the Namespaces in XML sense, see  
above. Using the same syntax in a controlled set of languages seem fine.  
If there's ever a need for a more "global" syntax that can be introduced  
when the problem arises.


>> 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.)

I don't think we should make this anymore generic than it is. If we keep  
it consistent with naming in HTML and SVG all should be fine.


> 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 doesn't fit in the requirements of ARIA, as far as I can tell. I'm  
also not sure what XML namespace notation support in CSS would help here  
as HTML doesn't support namespaces.


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

Received on Wednesday, 24 October 2007 11:34:03 UTC