[re-send. Originally mis-posted as
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2008Jun/0003.html
-Al ]
Re: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-xhtml-role-20080407/
This is a personal comment. It is a concern about a possible problem,
not the assertion of a sure problem.
WAI-ARIA has a dependency on the role attribute module, or at least
has a dependency on the host language affording a suitable @role
attribute
for which our roles are attribute values.
The Role Attribute module has been relaxed to allow a variety of ways
that the @role attribute is introduced into a host language or document.
But it appears to require that in any host language the
implementation of this
attribute takes as its value
<quote
cite="http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-xhtml-role-20080407/
#s_role_module_attributes">
one or more whitespace separated CURIEs
</quote>
[CURIE] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-xhtml-role-20080407/#ref_CURIE
Curies are new and progressing down the Rec track behind the Role
Attribute
Module. This would seem to be in reverse of the dependency-induced
order
as the Role Attribute has a dependency in this way on Curies.
In addition, because of the way that WAI-ARIA roles adjust element
semantics,
role values carry a connotation of language extension; and Curies
expand to
URIs which could indicate totally uncoordinated, crowd-sourced
distributed
language extension.
The latter could be regarded as undesirable for the maintenance of
HTML, the
central format of the One Web.
I am unclear how much saying that @role is a list of Curies means
that the
processor must process in accordance with the URIs that the Curies
abbreviate.
It would seem to me that WAI-ARIA needs host languages to respect the
@role values
set out in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab# vocabulary when
these values
appear un-prefixed as tokens (items in the space-separated list) in
the @role value.
What WAI-ARIA may need in terms of support for role extension is not
known at this
time. We have a working decision that role extension will not be
addressed in
WAI-ARIA 1.0.
In that sense, ARIA has a dependency on @role but does not need @role
to have
the dependency on Curies. And there is a chance that cross-host-
language support
for @role could be impeded by the dependency on curies.
That's my nervousness. We will be talking about this more as we work
to tighten up
the WAI-ARIA specification as it deals with host language insertion.
But I
was told to put it on record as a Last Call comment for the Role
Attribute Module
because it touches that specification which is already s/in/past it's
second
Last Call.
Thanks,
Al
/me
