Re: TAG concensus reached on ARIA implementation.

Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol) wrote:
> At our meeting on 29th May 2008, the TAG reached concenus on the following statement of its position wrt to the implementation of ARIA in host languages [1]:
> 
> "The TAG accepts that the most pragmatic short-term approach for WAI-PF is to go ahead and add attributes into the HTML5 spec, using names that begin "aria-" in liaison with the HTML-WG. This in no way endorses the use of the same attributes with other specs, or any XML specs, nor is this taken as being a solution for HTML versioning, HTML modularization, or HTML to XML conversions which are still open. Distributed extensibility remains an important goal for languages used on the Web, and for XML languages in particular. The TAG hopes to work with the community to strike the right balance between achieving that, and meeting the practical needs of the HTML community."
> ...

Aren't the "custom data attributes", newly introduced in HTML5 
(<http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#custom>), yet another example of 
non-distributed extensibility? After all, they use the same notation as 
ARIA (here "data-*") to achieve a result that in theory *could* be 
achieved using real namespace notation as well.

BR, Julian