- From: Elliotte Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>
- Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 07:57:27 -0700
- To: Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>
- Cc: Aaron M Leventhal <aleventh@us.ibm.com>, "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org>, public-html@w3.org, public-xhtml2@w3.org, wai-xtech@w3.org, wai-xtech-request@w3.org, www-tag@w3.org
It seems to me the ARIA is stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. There is no good solution. The question is only which is least bad. I personally don't know the answer to that. My gut is to prefer namespaces, but there are some very good practical arguments against that. It seems to me that the problem is primarily caused by attempting to shoehorn modular specs (ARIA) into a monolithic vocabulary (HTML). Similar problems have surfaced with the efforts to merge SVG and MathML into HTML. I increasingly don't think this will work. One of two plausible choices needs to be made: 1. Accept that HTML is monolithic. Merge ARIA into the core HTML spec, or incorporate it by reference. Make an ARIA attribute programmatically no different than class or style or id. ARIA is just a part of HTML 5, and provides no support for other host languages. 2. Modularize HTML. Require XHTML. Provide no ARIA (or SVG, or MathML) support in classic HTML. If you want that, you must use well-formed XHTML. I'm not sure the community has the will to make either of these choices; but if they don't ARIA, SVG, and MathML are all likely to fail. :-( -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elharo@metalab.unc.edu Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/
Received on Friday, 30 May 2008 14:58:11 UTC