Re: activedescendant vs activedescendent

Loretta Guarino Reid asked, quote:
> Could we consider changing it in the spec so it isn't misspelled?
unquote

aloha, loretta!

while i've questioned in the past why some spellings in the ARIA 
documents conform to en-us and others to en-gb, especially since 
the W3C Technical Report Publication Policy (a.k.a. Pubrules)

http://www.w3.org/2005/07/pubrules

declares that the normative natural language definition for W3C 
publications is en-us...   the specification syntax has been a topic
of discussion (such as labeledby versus labelledby -- one is the 
preferred spelling in en-us, whilst the other is the preferred spelling 
in en-gb) -- and the ARIA drafts reflect those individual decisions...

however, a request that ARIA syntax use the conventions of a single
consistent natural language wouldn't be (in my opinion) an outlandish
request and would do much to auto-answer syntax spelling questions by 
reference to the natural language declaration, en-us -- on the other
hand, ALL early adapters of ARIA would have to comprehensively review 
their application's code to ensure that their syntax conforms with 
the "new" syntax, which is an argument for keeping the terminal "e" 
spelling as the normative spelling

in any case, descendent is a viable, accepted spelling of the adjectival 
form of the verb "to descend" -- in particular, descending, as in going 
down, or descending from an ancestor -- consult:

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/descendent

also, compare the following two definitions:
 * http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/descendent
 * http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/descendant

gregory.
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            Gregory J. Rosmaita, oedipus@hicom.net
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Received on Monday, 10 December 2007 01:59:42 UTC