Re: ARIA in HTML -- a new FAQ, and a proposal

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:25:21 +0200, Aaron M Leventhal  
<aleventh@us.ibm.com> wrote:

>> [...] Can you point to any existing content that relies on this to be  
>> supported?
> We don't have access to all of the examples out there. There are  
> companies
> working with ARIA now, but we don't have the privelege (or punishment) of
> looking at their source.

Ok.

> Originally role was an xhtml2 namespaced attribute. After the role
> attribute came along to bring it into XHTML 1.1 (modules are technically
> not supported for XHTML 1.0 afaict).

Right. XHTML 1.0 also doesn't allow arbitrary attributes, so a role  
attribute in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace does not make it  
any more conforming XHTML 1.0 than the role attribute in no namespace or  
in the http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2 namespace.

> Thus, I felt that technically we
> needed to continue to support role as a namespaced attribute.

Agree, but there are two namespaced role attributes.

> If you think it is worth it, we can attempt to contact the companies and
> projects we know that are working on ARIA, and see how they are currently
> using the role attribute, and if they are willing to change it.
>
> But for me that's a much smaller issue than this main fix of allowing  
> ARIA
> to be easily used in text/html. I'm willing to persue it, if you think it
> is important.

I'm interested in limiting the ways to do things with ARIA to a minimum,  
with the following constraints:

   * We should support existing content.
   * It should be possible to use in both (X)HTML and other vocabularies  
without scripting.
   * The UA processing rules should be the same for both HTML and XHTML.

If there is no content that relies on the role attribute in the  
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace to be supported, then I would like  
support for it to be removed, but it is not overly important to me.

Cheers,
-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Monday, 24 September 2007 15:48:10 UTC