Steven Pemberton wrote:
Suppose we define a new markup language, Accessible HTML, which
includes the role attribute and all the WAI ARIA attributes. It
permits an author to write a document that validates according to that
new schema, and send it to an HTML4 processor, with well-defined
processing.
The author can also send it to an Accessible HTML processor, which can
do extra things with it, but it will still work with a legacy processor.
For those of you who might be new to this discussion... this is EXACTLY
why the XHTML M12N spec defines the XHTML Family. It is EXACTLY why
XHTML conforming user agents are required to deal with family members,
and why there is an announcement mechanism that makes it possible for
user agents to determine that a unknown, never before seen markup
language is indeed a family member. The whole point of that
architecture was that it would be possible for the standard processing
rules for XHTML documents would be applied to future markup languages,
thus ensuring predictable behavior of new documents even in older user
agents.
I consider it a great personal failing that none of the major browser
vendors ever seemed to grok this. Had they, the browser world might be
a very different place today.
--
Shane P. McCarron Phone: +1 763 786-8160 x120
Managing Director Fax: +1 763 786-8180
ApTest Minnesota Inet: sh...@aptest.com
