- From: Matthew Raymond <mattraymond@earthlink.net>
- Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2007 23:38:17 -0400
- To: Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com>
- CC: public-html <public-html@w3.org>, public-xhtml2@w3.org, "wai-xtech@w3.org" <wai-xtech@w3.org>
With regard to the |role| attribute, I suggest you replace it with an attribute named "aria-role" for the following reasons: 1) It maintains consistency with your aria-/attribute/ nomenclature. 2) You don't have to modify the parsing of the |role| attribute to treat ARIA elements as if they were in the XHTML namespace. Instead, you have a separate attribute that only takes the roles defined in the WAI-ARIA Roles spec. 3) People who use |role| aren't confused by the lack of a namespace for ARIA roles and have a clear understanding that the roles are ARIA-related. 4) Even with ARIA roles placed directly in the XHTML namespace, the only other unnamespaced roles the the |role| attribute can take are the nine defined in the XML Role Attribute spec, and many of those conflict with proposed elements in HTML5. Thus, to justify the existence of the |role| attribute in HTML, you need ARIA. The opposite, however, is not the case. Here's an example of how the new attribute would be used: | <div aria-role="checkbox" aria-checked="true"></div> Also, I suggest we allow the new |aria-role| attribute to take only a single ARIA role as a value. The WAI-ARIA Role spec doesn't really define how to deal with the use of multiple ARIA roles simultaneously, nor does it give an example of such. Having a single value makes it easier to parse, easier for authors to read and write, and takes up less space in the HTML5 specification.
Received on Thursday, 27 September 2007 03:39:54 UTC