RE: Work that would be required to revert Internet Explorer 8 to 'aria:'

Al Gilman [mailto:Alfred.S.Gilman@IEEE.org] asked:

>I don't know who could speak for Microsoft on such a question -- who
>holds product authority.  Normally I would work through Marc Silbey
>to find the right person in Microsoft, but he is incommunicado
>through the end of the month and so I am approaching you.

Fair enough.

>[the TAG] are asking for a realistic statement on the ease/likelihood
>of such a change; we of PFWG would appreciate it if the answer adds a
>schedule dimension.  Rough estimate of calendar time elapsed before a
>colon-using release of FireFox [presumably you meant to say IE here]

The change is somewhat significant in terms of code to make ARIA as useful as it is now (e.g. for attribute selectors to work seamlessly with namespaces).  I expect if this change were make in the spec, it would be unlikely to make the IE8 release.  Of course, we do want to be interoperable, so if the specification were to change, we would want to make the change in our code as soon as possible.

In addition, though I'm more open to XML extensibility as the right way to go for the web, I think as Charles detailed in depth it's probably really confusing the issue.  I expect we're not "putting a colon in an attribute," we're inserting namespaces into HTML - which although I personally think would be a good thing, I think for the case of disambiguating ARIA properties, which we want to be used everywhere, it is not the right thing.

>Is it possible for someone to speak on behalf of Microsoft in
>response to the question from the TAG?   Could you be the person?

Yes and yes.  I'm happy to discuss further with the TAG if desired.

-Chris

Received on Thursday, 22 May 2008 20:52:29 UTC