ARIA Feedback

Dear PFWG,

a had a little time to take a look at the current ARIA working draft, 
and I found three issues I'd like to comment on:


1. Errors in the ARIA Attributes Module

a) There is a minor spelling error in the document description, "Rick 
Internat" instead of "Rich Internet".

b) The system identifier still contains the historic term "aaa" - 
shouldn't that be updated to "aria" instead?

c) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think "undefined" is missing in the 
allowed values for aria-checked:

    Current definition:
    aria-checked ( true | false | mixed ) 'undefined'

    Correct definition:
    aria-checked ( true | false | mixed | undefined ) 'undefined'

d) "spelling" and "grammar" are both missing in aria-invalid:

    Current definition:
    aria-invalid ( true | false ) 'false'

    Correct definition:
    aria-invalid ( true | false | grammar | spelling ) 'false'


2. The description of "tabindex" is missing in the current version.[1] 
In the previous version[2] "tabindex" was still listed as a global 
property. The only change should have been that "tabindex" is now a 
global attribute indeed that is not limited certain elements (BTW, 
thanks for picking up my earlier suggestion).

Speaking about "tabindex", I'm not familiar with the IE8 DOM 
implementation yet, but IE6 and IE7 implemented it as "tabIndex" while 
all other browsers use "tabindex" in DOM scripting. It would be 
convenient if Microsoft could agree to accept "tabindex" in the future.


3. Sample DTD

The sample DTD is great, although I still believe it's too much to ask 
an author to create a DTD file and serve it with the correct mime type 
from his own server. From the example I thought I could just use the URI 
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-aria-1.dtd as a system identifier, 
but it throws a 404 error. Therefore I would like to suggest hosting the 
DTD file on the usual W3C server. That would be more convenient for 
authors, as a side effect browsers could recognize the DTD as one of the 
known DTDs for mode switching and accepting non-numerical HTML entities 
when the page is served with a XHTML mime type.


That said I would like to congratulate on the ARIA Best Practices 
document! Recently I had to create a tablist navigation, and although a 
few key combinations can't be captured or prevented from bubbling in 
some browsers (ctrl-PageDown / PageUp in Firefox, ctrl-Tab / 
ctrl-Shift-Tab in IE), the list of interactive keys was really helpful. 
I'm sure I would have overlooked some keys or implemented a different 
behavior without the list. So thanks again!

Cheers,
   Martin


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-wai-aria-20080806/#global_states
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-wai-aria-20080204/#global_states
     http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-wai-aria-20080204/#tabindex

-- 
Martin Kliehm
Senior Frontend Engineer

namics (deutschland) gmbh
Gutleutstraße 96
60329 Frankfurt am Main
Germany

http://www.namics.com, http://blog.namics.com, http://learningtheworld.eu
Skype martin.kliehm

Handelsreg. B des Amtsgerichts Frankfurt a.M. / Reg.-Nr. HRB 57721
Sitz: Frankfurt a.M. / Geschäftsführerin: Elke Schreckenbach

Received on Wednesday, 12 November 2008 17:25:27 UTC