Re: Role attribute values

Hi Shane,

I just read this really quickly so these are not all of my comments,
but here are a few quick ones.

1. Having 'double names' seems to be redundant, and reduce the
potential usefulness. An example would be @role="alertdialog", which
can be just as easily expressed as @role="alert dialog". This is more
useful from a processing point of view, and also reduces the size of
the vocabulary.

2. Similarly, @role="menuitemcheckbox" seems unnecessary, since the
element in question could more usefully be expressed as a menu item,
that is also a checkbox, i.e., @role="menuitem checkbox".

3. Qualifying a name based on its context also seems to reduce the
potential usefulness of a name. For example, just because a 'gridcell'
is most likely to be used in a 'grid', doesn't mean that is the only
place there will be 'cells'. That causes a problem in the future,
because it means authors either have to use 'gridcell' outside of the
context of a 'grid'--which would seem awkward--or they would have to
invent some new role name for 'a cell'. Yet if we call this thing
'cell' instead of 'gridcell' from the beginning, we'll not have this
problem.

4. Some things seem to be oddly named. Why is a range control named a
'slider'? That points very much towards a specific style of UI
rendering, and doesn't really speak to accessibility. Also, since a
'spinbutton' is described as a range control, why not make it an
actual range control?

Also, unrelated to the content, why are some of the properties marked
up as having a datatype of xsd:string? If it's to inhibit the
rdf:XMLLiteral processing, wouldn't it be better to just use
@datatype="", and get a plain literal?

Regards,

Mark

2008/4/4 Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com>:
>
>  Thanks to the hard work of Michael Cooper, the current list of ARIA-defined
> roles is now included in the XHTML vocabulary document at
> http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab
>
>  While doing this, he and I noticed that there is some duplication between
> ARIA-defined roles and XHTML module-defined roles.  This was of course
> unintentional.  My proposal would be that we harmonize these lists as soon
> as possible - preferably by removing any role values that the ARIA group
> thinks are unnecessary.   Since the list came from them in the first place,
> and was just updated by them a few weeks ago, this makes the most sense to
> me.
>
>  This is not urgent, and we can update this document as we need to.  But I
> didn't want to lose the thread.  Roland, can you please put this on the
> agenda for next Wednesday?
>
>  --
>  Shane P. McCarron                          Phone: +1 763 786-8160 x120
>  Managing Director                            Fax: +1 763 786-8180
>  ApTest Minnesota                            Inet: shane@aptest.com
>
>
>
>



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 Mark Birbeck

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Received on Saturday, 5 April 2008 16:00:09 UTC