WAI-ARIA: General comments

It is very unclear in the draft which requirements apply to authors, which  
apply to host languages, which apply to implementors (if any, I thought  
this was going to be separate?). It would be nice if that was made much  
more clear and if the "conformance" section would introduce the classes of  
products properly.


Overall it seems that there is a lot of focus on theory by means of OWL  
and RDF which is not actually used in practice (implementations are done  
by DTDs, Java code, RNG, C++ at the browser level). This distracts a lot  
and makes the specification hard to follow where a simple description of  
which roles there are and which properties they take and how they relate  
would work much better and use less text. Likewise relying on XML Scheme  
for datatypes seems not at all optimal for normal Web authors that  
eventually have to grok all this and use it. I think the document could be  
made a lot more accessible if it removed these abstract concepts and  
described itself more realistically.


WAI-ARIA introduces a lot of concepts based on holes in HTML4 that Web  
authors have meanwhile filled using scripting. It would be good if  
WAI-ARIA was evaluated again in the light of HTML5. I'm not saying  
anything needs to change, but maybe comments could be made on HTML5 on how  
the two could be more seamlined. Admittedly I have not reviewed the  
various roles myself in depth. Partially because the way they are defined  
is hard to follow.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/

Received on Thursday, 2 April 2009 12:26:17 UTC