RE: Question #2 on 4.1.1 Parsing - what it covers - markup-wise

Katie Haritos-Shea wrote:
>
> Do we as a Working Group believe that 4.1.1 is ONLY applicable to content
> implemented using HTML/XHTML/XML as the markup languages? (and if so,
> why didn’t we say that?)

I believe the answer is NO, WCAG 2 was not only for HTML/XHTML/XML (where I will note that HTML and XML, as stand along markup languages, are already quite different in many ways). However, I base this belief based upon the following from the WCAG 2 Abstract:

   " WCAG 2.0 success criteria are written as testable statements that are not technology-specific." - https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ 

Some may argue that "technology" here refers to hardware/form-factors as well as software (browsers/screen readers and other AT), whereas "HTML" isn't so much a technology as a markup language, but I think that is a hair too fine to split - I interpret it as "all of it" - the whole package as delivered to and interacted-with by the individual user.

>
> Or, would this SC cover say, SVG or ARIA, or other languages or content that
> is used to implement and enhance markup languages, that may also contain
> start and end tags, elements, attributes, attribute values and/or IDs?

Was 'SC 4.1.1 Parsing' intended to apply to other languages? Based on the agnostic approach of WCAG (which, amongst other things, has already been applied to PDF and Flash content) I would say yes: it would apply to SVG, MathML, heck even Cold Fusion (<cfcontent > anyone?) as they are all markup languages; I would suggests as well that it applies to ARIA, although only the 3rd point "elements do not contain duplicate attributes" as ARIA is all attributes, and no elements, so the failure would be a duplication of aria attributes on an element... (I suspect that as written however, SC 4.1.1 does not have a direct material impact on ARIA beyond that)

>
​​​​​> (Yes, like many of you, I also think about these things at midnight…….:-)

There's a solution for that - SMS

As David pointed out earlier, there was some discussion back in the day over "validation", but we need to keep things in historical perspective as well. Not only was the un-escaped ampersands 'problem' a non-problem, but remember as well that the minute you added any ARIA to a "valid" HTML 4.1 or XHTML 1.1 document it instantly became "non-valid", as the DTDs associated to those languages did not recognize ARIA attributes. I think that this was also a factor in winnowing 4.1.1 down to where it is today.

JF

Received on Wednesday, 13 January 2016 15:56:36 UTC