RE: ARIA style sheet

Forwarding comments from one of our developers, Todd Kloots. I tend to
agree.

<forward>
The major downside to this approach, I think, aside from the fact that
it invalidates the CSS, roots back to the separation of concerns between
CSS and HTML.  ARIA is designed to supplement the semantics of the
markup, hence its inclusion into HTML 5.  CSS has a different role
entirely.  Additionally, since CSS and JavaScript can be disabled in the
browser, ARIA would be toggled off should the user disable CSS and/ or
JavaScript.  Since most roles require JavaScript-based keyboard event
handlers to work, this is a somewhat of a non issue.  However, ARIA
landmark roles significantly improve the semantics of a document and
don't require JavaScript or CSS to work.  Therefore, I would hate to see
someone using this technique to apply any ARIA roles that fall into this
category.

- Todd
</forward>

Thanks,
Victor

-----Original Message-----
From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Chris Blouch
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 7:55 AM
To: 'W3C WAI-XTECH'
Subject: ARIA style sheet

Why didn't we think of this before? Matt Machell had the bright idea
that we should apply aria attributes to a page using the same css
selector process we use for styling. Something like this:

#first {
  role: slider;
  described-by: #second;
  value-min: 10;
  value-max: 30;
}

He then went on to write 12 lines of JQuery script to implement the
technique. See

http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2009/02/22/a-wai-aria-stylesheet

This just seems like  an infinitely useful solution that ought to be
developed and implemented native in the browsers.

CB

Received on Monday, 23 February 2009 20:08:43 UTC