Re: role vs aria-role

Hi Martin,

It's not really "historical" -- @role was devised for more than just
accessibility.

The idea of @role is to express the 'purpose' of the element that it
is on, as a 'hook' for other things.

Of course, an obvious use for this 'hook' is to provide accessibility,
and it's great to see that the ARIA work has taken @role and run with
it.

But there is no reason that other technologies could not be built on
top of @role, and so @role really is more than 'just' @aria-role.

Regards,

Mark

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Martin Kliehm<martin.kliehm@namics.com> wrote:
> On 18.08.2009, at 08:30, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
>
> On Aug 18, 2009, at 08:33, Jim Jewett wrote:
>
> Please allow the use of "aria-role" for the purposes currently filled
>
> by the "role" attribute in all processing related to aria.
>
> Too late. Implementations have shipped.
>
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2009Mar/0123.html
>
> Also according to the WAI ARIA spec the attribute's name is "role", an
> "aria-role" does not exist. I agree it's a little inconsistent and has
> historical reasons (originally roles and states & properties were two
> separate specs), but that's how it is implemented and what's in the specs.
> I'm fine with that and don't see much danger for authors.
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/#Using_intro



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Mark Birbeck, webBackplane

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Received on Tuesday, 18 August 2009 16:18:32 UTC