Re: Next steps for the ARIA syntax discussion

On Wednesday 2008-05-14 16:22 +0000, Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol) wrote:
>   2) Is the cost-benefit analysis in [1] missing any substantive
>      considerations, particularly as regards the cost of changing

I would note the following additional considerations:

 (1) Adding any namespace-like syntax to text/html before
 discussions on potential extensibility mechanisms are settled may
 significantly constrain the potential solutions of those
 discussions.

 (2) Adding additional ways in which text/html needs to be
 transformed (such as having to change an aria-role attribute to an
 aria:role attribute, or similar changes to associated style sheets
 or scripts) in order to become application/xhtml+xml increases the
 costs of migrating to application/xhtml+xml and makes
 application/xhtml+xml less likely to be used by Web pages.

 (3) Producing W3C recommendations that recommend bad practices in
 order to gain compatibility (things like escaped colons in CSS
 selectors) will encourage the use of those bad practices in other
 areas as well.


One other point is that I'd been told by some people that ARIA
itself was only a short-term stopgap until additional semantic
elements / attributes were available in HTML.  If that's the case
(is it?), how concerned should we be about long-term issues?

-David

> [1] http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/05/syntax_for_aria_costbenefit_an.html

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Wednesday, 21 May 2008 21:53:00 UTC