Re: Next steps for the ARIA syntax discussion

Hi Charles,

On Jun 1, 2008, at 3:01 AM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

>
>> The decision, therefore, comes down to this: how much does  
>> following the web architecture matter?
>
> I don't think so. The mistake was suggesting that there should be a  
> namespace other than the null string for aria attributes. ("In no  
> namespace" is somehow consdered a more useful phrase despite the  
> misunderstandings it has caused, but I think it is an idiotic piece  
> of terminology to continue with). I hope and believe that the PF  
> group are about to correct that error, and therefore have a way of  
> doing ARIA that is consistent with actual implementations and the  
> HTML and XML Namespaces specifications and their discernible futures.

I think its important that the HTML5 recommendation say nothing about  
namespace with regard to the XML serialization of HTML5. The XML  
namespaces recommendation is designed to be modular. The only thing  
other recommendations need to concern themselves with is providing a  
namespace URI to uniquely identify the vocabulary. Adding namespace  
related specification into HTML5 is basically scope creep and a unwise  
scope creep as well. It makes changing and updating these orthogonal  
recommendations (e.g., HTML and XML NS) that much harder. I know other  
recommendations have made this mistake, but that doesn't mean we  
should do so too.

As for the text/html serialization we should be careful here as well.  
As TAG has already expressed a desire to add distributed extensibility  
to text/html in the future, we should again be careful here. I don't  
see a problem with the no namespace name (or null nameespace since the  
difference in what we call it here is trivial).  However, it is hard  
to foresee what problems we might cause for W3C if we start moving  
HTML5 specified elements and attributes into other various namespaces  
(other than the html namespace and the null namespace or no name  
namespace).

Take care,
Rob

Received on Tuesday, 3 June 2008 11:18:05 UTC