Re: ISSUE-636 ACTION-1398 Provide spec. text for aria-roledescription

We have a backwards-compatible way to put in role aliases (e.g. "none" for "presentation") and phase out legacy ones. If anyone has a creative idea of how to alias or phase out attributes in a reasonably backwards-compatible manner, I'd love to hear it, but I think we're stuck with aria-labelledby unfortunately. I think of it as ARIA's "referer." ;-)

On Apr 4, 2014, at 11:24 AM, Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com> wrote:

> Yeah. I agree.  But I always spell labeled wrong ;-)  
> 
> 
> On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 12:52 PM, James Craig <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:
> On Apr 4, 2014, at 9:47 AM, Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com> wrote:
> 
>> I sort of like the idea of aliasing for ease of authoring.
> 
> I'm 100% opposed to aliases for these. It may make 1 thing easier, but it makes 100 more problems.
> 
> There's no good way to reconcile aliased attributes. What's the label IDREF for this element? Foo? Bar? Both?
> <div aria-labelledby="foo" aria-labeledby="bar"> 
> 
> What about this usage? 
> <div aria-labeledby="bar">
> element.getAttribute("aria-labelledby"); // Correctly returns undefined. Forcing this to return the value of a different attribute would break the DOM.
> 
> 
>> On the other hand, permitting illegal junk in markup is why the web is so screwed up.  
> 
> Agreed. Let's try to avoid any more screwage.
> 
> 
>> On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 11:34 AM, Charles McCathie Nevile <chaals@yandex-team.ru> wrote:
>> On Thu, 03 Apr 2014 23:51:30 +0200, James Craig <jcraig@apple.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Apr 3, 2014, at 2:09 PM, Joseph Scheuhammer <clown@alum.mit.edu>
>> 
>> The suggested spec text includes (my emphasis) " ...Provides a human readable, *localized* string name for the role of the element."  I'm not entirely sure what W3C English spelling policy is -- American only, Commonwealth only, or a mixture.
>> 
>> I think it's fine to have the term used in prose with either spelling… Editor's choice if the W3C style guide does not specify.
>> 
>> W3C policy for prose is to use US English in all its official text.
>> 
>> 
>> To avoid that issue, use l7d.  Then again, maybe the official policy is that kind of acronym is not allowed either.
>> 
>> In spec prose, either spelling is preferable to the abbreviation for the sake of clarity.
>> 
>> In an attribute name or value token, my opinion is that neither spelling nor the abbreviation is acceptable due to web author confusion with spelling or clarity of meaning.
>> 
>> Agreed.
>> 
>> Explaining to developers who have know a limited amount of english which
>> spelling variant they have to use is a recipe for mistakes. Either alias
>> the two variants, or choose something easier to get right.
>> 
>> cheers
>> 
>> Chaals
>> 
>> -- 
>> Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
>>         chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com
>> 
>> 
> 
>