role vs aria-role

Please allow the use of "aria-role" for the purposes currently filled
by the "role" attribute in all processing related to aria.  It is
probably fine if "role" gets used when "aria-role" is not present.

ARIA-related Rationale:

All other attributes used by aria begin with "aria-".  While this is
not technically a namespace in XML terms, it is effectively a
namespace in authors' minds.  Exceptions to consistent rules -- such
as the bare "role" -- are error-prone.

Non-ARIA-related rationale:

ARIA roles are not the *only* use of the role attribute.  They may be
the most common.  Other uses may be non-standard, and could probably
be worked around with an appropriate use of classes or data-*
attributes, but ... it just seems to be asking for clashes where they
aren't needed.

Reasoning by analogy:

Reserving "role" plus "aria-*" feels a bit as if the RDFa proponents
had asked to reserve "rdfa-*", and had written rules for 30 such
attributes, but *also* wanted sole claim to the "title" attribute.
(Or maybe just a "subject" attribute instead of "title"; current (and
possibly conflicting) usage frequency for "role" is somwhere between
the two.)

-jJ

Received on Tuesday, 18 August 2009 05:34:25 UTC