Re: ARIA in HTML -- a new FAQ, and a proposal

On Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:24:55 +0200, Aaron M Leventhal  
<aleventh@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> Please take a look at the FAQ. I hope it will help frame a constructive
> discussion about ARIA. One particular part I want to discuss in this  
> group is Ian Hickson's proposal (in the FAQ) to remove the namespace  
> dependency
> for ARIA properties. I have run this proposal by other browser
> manufacturers and large content providers involved in ARIA development.

This seems like the best way forward, indeed. Here's a bit more detailed  
on how I think it could work taking into account legacy content,  
ease-of-authoring, consistency with other standards, and deployed software:

role attributes on elements in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace  
are supported and take a space-separated list of roles. (This covers both  
text/html and application/xml for what it's worth if the parsing algorithm  
in HTML5 is followed.)

role attributes in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace on elements  
not in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace are supported and also  
take a space-separated list of roles.

ARIA properties are supported as aria-{property} attributes on elements in  
the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace (replacing {property} with the  
name of the property).

ARIA properties are also supported as {property} in the  
http://www.w3.org/2005/07/aaa namespace on _all_ elements. These take  
precedence over the aria-{property} attributes on elements in the  
http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace. (Equivalent to how the lang and  
xml:lang attributes interact.) Note that it is impossible to write these  
down in a text/html serialization unless it is done in the DOM that is  
generated from such a serialization.


As for the list of roles, I would prefer if we simply remove the  
complicated qname idea and make them opaque strings just like the rel,  
class, etc. attributes already work. This seems more consistent and easier  
to author. Especially considering that the DOM and CSS don't have support  
for namespaced attribute values so that authoring once, deploying  
everywhere (for equivalent documents) does not work automatically. This  
seems problematic.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>

Received on Friday, 21 September 2007 14:26:17 UTC