Hi all, I've been researching for a way to use aria roles and states, to enhance accessibility on a web application, but it seems to be turning my brain into a soup of glia cells and floating neurons flashing like crazy fireflies!
I decided to use polyglot markup, allthough it involved serving it as text-html for old trident browsers, to be able to include xml content on the site (wich I'm still learning). Since I'm using dropdown menus, that do not open on tab focus without javascript, I decided to try on wai-aria to improve the overall accessibility of the site, complementing the semantics, with or without javascript. And all was well, I was loving the idea and the new possibilities WAI-ARIA brings to the game, untill I tested it in http://validator.nu/. According to the Polyglot Markup: HTML-Compatible XHTML Documents ( http://www.w3.org/TR/html-polyglot/) I shouldn't use any docktype on the head of the document besides the <!DOCTYPE HTML> declaration, and am only allowed to use the default namespaces <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"> wich by the way, I can and should omit, because they are included in the html5 by default. Yet XHTML is, according to http://www.alistapart.com/articles/waiaria/ the extendible markup language, so it makes sense to extended it. Also, xml is supposed to allow for publication and standardization of doctypes and schemas, to avoid the need to be always reinventing the weel, and to allow easier document sharing. Since WAI-ARIA is gaining so mutch ground in terms of implementation (I'm gessing probably more driven by the mobile market then by the screen reader user needs) their should be already a doctype or a schema learking around. I'm not sure the one on ALAs exemple is what I need, but then again, it seems to have been designed to xhtml 1.1, not to polyglot XHTML5. I canĀ“t avoid stranging that I'm finding so few documents on the web mentioning both polyglot markup and WAI-ARIA, most of them refering to older xhtml versions, stating the incompatibility, whille telling us to break the standards in favor of the accessibility (no doubt accessibility is more important, but why should one have to choose?). I'm probably missing something here, this doesn't make much sense, I'm really, really confused, too many documents, from several different groups, and I'm far from an expert. Can any of you offer some guidance on the matter? already gratefull for your time, regards isabel santos ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************