- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:34:21 +0100
- To: "T.V Raman" <raman@google.com>
- CC: aleventh@us.ibm.com, wai-xtech@w3.org, wai-xtech-request@w3.org
T.V Raman wrote: > Algorithm == good --- mandatory --- at this early stage == asking > for disaster. Hmm. Perhaps by "mandatory", you think I mean a formal Recommendation. When I say "mandatory", I mean the draft specification should use language like "MUST" when talking about the algorithm, not talk in wishy-washy terms like "MAY" and "SHOULD". Such language would be relative to ARIA's status as a Working Draft. In so far as implementations could meaningfully be said to conform, they would conform to the draft as of a stated date. If this is what you thought I meant by "mandatory", can you elaborate on how this would be "asking for disaster"? If an algorithm is mandatory (in this sense) and implementors find a serious problem with it, then there's time to change it long before ARIA becomes a Recommendation. On the other hand, if there's no mandatory algorithm: * It's hard for implementors to know how to apply the roles, since what they mean is merely suggested and not defined. role="main" might be the main area for the ancestor role="document", or it might not. * It's hard for implementors to give feedback, since it's not clear what the spec is saying. * We have lots of people encouraging very early adoption of ARIA. Without mandatory algorithms, implementations by early adopters might differ substantially, potentially preventing a reliable algorithm being defined later. Others may disagree, but I'd suggest even a suboptimal but well defined and widely implemented algorithm is preferable to a perfectly designed conformance requirement produced late in the day that nobody can implement without breaking existing content. -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Wednesday, 8 October 2008 15:34:59 UTC