Re: role vs aria-role

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 3:39 AM, Anne van Kesteren<annevk@opera.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:08:56 +0200, Jim Jewett <jimjjewett@gmail.com> wrote:

>> It is too late to say "Don't use a bare 'role' ", but I
>> don't think it is too late to say "Also support
>> 'aria-role' " or even "if 'role' and 'aria-role'
>> disagree, believe 'aria-role' ".

>> [ good graceful degradation; very few
>>  opportunity costs, because the number
>>  of people who quickly switch is likely
>>  balanced by people careless mistakes
>>  that wouldn't get caught with the current
>>  system. ]

> Besides consistency there does not seem to be
> much in favor of this.

There is also dis-ambiguation with other uses of role.

> ... if we did this introducing another bunch of
> more proper aliases might be considered nice to
> have too, e.g. encoding="" instead of charset="".

I see two crucial differences between "aria-role" and "encoding".

(1)  "charset" is not ambiguous.  It is arguably wrong, and it may be
confusing to people familiar with other standards, but it doesn't have
multiple meanings within HTML.

(2)  Neither "encoding" nor "charset" are part of an obvious (mental,
not formal) namespace.

-jJ

Received on Tuesday, 18 August 2009 16:32:46 UTC