Matthew Raymond wrote:
[...] where a proper CSS presentation for the users primary media is
not available [...]
This is almost always the case on the real web.
Yeah, the web masters are so lazy that they can't be bothered to add
accessibility via CSS, but they'll be working overtime putting in |role|
attributes using the correct predefined values.
/me rolls eyes.
Roll your eyes all you want but when you get bored, perhaps you'd like
to try thinking about the relative difficulty of the two tasks instead
:-) For many widgets it is entirely obvious what their role attribute
should be (if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck).
So adding this information to the semantic layer (i.e. not CSS) is easy.
Furthermore, people who make common widget toolkits can add
accessibility information at the toolkit layer (see e.g. [1]) so authors
don't need to work very hard.
I don't see a significant difference between |role| and predefined
values for |class|.
Oh and I'm allergic to predefined class values :)
I would suggest a strong antihistamine whenever you use a microformat.
Indeed there are, I believe, a number of problems with microformats
associated with their use of the class attribute (e.g. I remember a
discussion some time ago in which it turned out that microformats must
use globally unique classnames)
