- From: Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com>
- Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:45:15 -0500
- To: HTML WG <w3c-html-wg@w3.org>, "'wai-xtech'" <wai-xtech@w3.org>
(resent to wai-xtech so it is public) XHTML 2 and PFWG members, I have been following with interest the debate in the TAG regarding the mechanism the PFWG has proposed for addressing issues with namespaces and support for the ARIA work in non-XML user agents. I appreciate all of the effort that has gone into the debate, and of course understand that there are strong opinions on all sides. In the middle of that debate, I read an impassioned plea from Rich for some sensibility, which I translated as "Can't we all just get along?" In the spirit of that, I tried to think outside the box a little bit - just as we did at the f2f meeting in Venice when considering how to deal with ARIA-defined values for @role. Consequently, I propose the following: 1. Eliminate the private "aria" namespace. 2. Incorporate the 'aria-*' attributes into the XHTML namespace. 3. Define the attributes in an XHTML M12N-conforming module so that they can be easily incorporated into XHTML Family markup languages. 4. Make that module "chameleon", just like XHTML Role, so that other languages can easily incorporate the attributes into their own namespace if they choose. 5. Ensure that such a definition does not preclude the use in non-XML grammars such as HTML 5. I propose this for (at least) the following reasons: 1. It costs *us* nothing (there is work for the PFWG, but it costs the XHTML 2 Working Group nothing ;-). 2. It promotes the ARIA techniques in the same way that incorporating Ruby or Xforms into the XHTML namespace promoted them - helping ensure they are not viewed as second class technologies. 3. It basically eliminates the problems with CSS styling and access to the attributes via JavaScript, including the ability to develop style sheets and scripts that work portably regardless of whether the enclosing document is treated as HTML or XHTML - for the vast majority of use cases, anyway. 4. There will only be one "name" for all the ARIA attributes. I fully understand that this is not a perfect solution. I also expect that there are people who will continue to object to using a dash for scoping instead of the well-defined QName mechanism. Those objections are legitimate and there are long term ramifications to not using namespaces when they are appropriate. However, I think in this case relegating these critical accessibility enablers to a non-XHTML namespace serves no one, and therefore the use of an alternate namespace for this work is inappropriate. Unfortunately, attempting to incorporate the attributes into the XHTML namespace and XHTML markup languages without the aria- prefix would be impossible. There would be too many collisions with existing attribute names. Ignoring the technical side of the debate, we have a responsibility to all members of the web community - and that community includes A LOT of people who are being rapidly disenfranchised because accessibility is just too damn hard in the Web 2.0 world. We need to solve this. And solve it now. I say we embrace the ARIA solution in the XHTML space and move on! -- Shane P. McCarron Phone: +1 763 786-8160 x120 Managing Director Fax: +1 763 786-8180 ApTest Minnesota Inet: shane@aptest.com
Received on Friday, 25 April 2008 18:45:57 UTC