Re: Strategic decision time (was Re: Next steps for the ARIA syntax discussion)

On Thu, 29 May 2008, Henry S. Thompson wrote:
> 
> We have to set against the problems with aria: the medium- and
> long-term negative aspects of the aria- approach, which focusses on
> ease of ARIA integration in text/html environments at the expense of
> costly integration throughout the application/...+xml universe.

Just so we're clear as to the scales here, the text/html environment 
consists of some 100 billion pages or so (to a first order approximation), 
while the application/...+xml universe consists of about 5 million pages. 
(This is based upon a study of several billion documents I did last year.)

We should weigh the costs against those numbers before optimising for the 
XML case.


> From my perspective, the cost of aria: in the text/html environment is 
> modest, manageable, and declining over time, whereas the cost of aria- 
> in the application/...+xml universe is large and permanent.

The cost of aria: is that it puts up a huge barrier for migration from 
HTML to XML, thus reducing the value of the XML universe.

The cost of aria- is that it makes the W3C look silly for having designed 
a namespace mechanism that it can't use.

Which do we care more about? Migrating to XML, or not looking silly?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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