Re: Next steps for the ARIA syntax discussion

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I agree that managing the interactions between Get/SetAttribute[NS]
and the DOM is important.  I will respond in detail to your (and
Anne's) points about this in a day or two, but in the mean time I can
set the stage for that discussion by outlining what I personally think
adoping the aria: approach means in detail.  What follows is meant to
be set of unconditional strategies, that is, not requiring any
diagnosis as to parse type (XML vs HTML) or browser family:

For an ARIA property whose name is 'foo':

      Today                             At some point in the future

 In documents, use an attribute
 spelled 'aria:foo'                     
(in XML documents, include an NS        [use any prefix]
 declaration "xmlns:aria=
 'http://www.w3.org/2005/07/aaa'")

 In script, to get the value of         [use GetAttributeNS('http://.../aaa',
 the property, use                                          'foo')]
 GetAttribute("aria:foo")

 In script, to set the value of         [use SetAttributeNS('http://.../aaa',
 the property, use                                          'foo',...)]
 SetAttribute("aria:foo",...)

 For access from UA implementation,     [test attribute's namespaceURI
 e.g. for interface with accessibility   field against 'http://...aaa' and
 APIs, test attribute node's name        localName against 'foo']
 field against "aria:foo"

 For CSS selectors, use
  @namespace aria url(http://.../aaa)   [ use only [aria|foo] ]
  . . .
  [aria\:foo], [aria|foo]

The right-hand column is provided as an indication of where we might
hope to get at some point, but the proposal does _not_ depend on
that.  The strategies in the left-hand column will work today and will
continue to work indefinitely, insofar as implementations continue to
respect the relevant specs as they do today.

Known issues:

 1) CSS will not work for IE, _may_ be fixed in IE8;
 2) GetAttribute will not work for Safari version 2.0 and earlier (but
    works in 3.1);
 3) SetAttribute will not work for Opera (but this is a bug against
    the existing DOM specs. and they _should_ be willing to fix it!)

ht
- -- 
 Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
                     Half-time member of W3C Team
    2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
            Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                   URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
[mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam]
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Received on Thursday, 15 May 2008 14:24:35 UTC