Re: conformance checker for HTML+ARIA?

Hi Aaron,

> @2008-09-30 14:07 +0200:
> We do need a solution soon. This keeps coming up.
> 
> I think W3C should drive this, since developers want the official W3C 
> stamp of approval.

The requirement of having a solution soon and the requirement of
having the W3C drive the work and provide a stamp of approval are
not compatible requirements. And I'm not trying to be a smartass
when I say that.

I don't know who the stakeholders are who need this solution as
soon as possible, but whoever they are, I'd suggest that they are
the ones that need to do the work and drive it, if they want it
done soon.

> W3C can use a multi-pronged solution:
> 1. Short term: create new DTD and ask W3C to host it. It can be considered 
> "beta" for now.  It needs to include HTML 4 + tabindex changes (allow 
> negative numbers and on any element) + WAI-ARIA. 

Writing the actual DTD is not a whole lot of work, especially for
somebody who's got a little experience with messing around with
DTDs customizations. And even for somebody who doesn't, I don't
think the learning curve is very steep. I'd suspect that the
difficult part is getting agreement about what exactly the
specific validity constraints in the DTD should be. I mean, I get
the impression from the message that Steven cited that there's not
agreement on the schema that Henri made. So regardless, it seems
like you need to get agreement on what the extra constraints
should be. I'm not sure where the best place would be to have a
discussion about that. I don't think it would be inappropriate to
have it on public-html but I'm not sure that's the best place.

Anyway, if you want to get it done soon, I really don't think
trying to get it taken on officially or formally as a work item by
the HTML WG is going to help expedite it. It would seem best to
have a focused discussion somewhere just among the group of people
who have the most buy-in into the need to get it done soon and
have insight about how to make it happen.

It seems like Henri could be a big help here. If you really feel
like you need a DTD, one possible solution is to generate a DTD
from a modified version of the WHATTF/validator.nu RelaxNG
sources. There's a tool called "trang" can do that *if* the HTML
4.01 schemas don't contain any constraints that can't be
down-translated to DTD expressions. I don't know if they do or not.

If Henri doesn't have enough time to help with it right now, I'd
be willing to help out too.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/

Received on Tuesday, 30 September 2008 12:40:10 UTC