On 20/1/09 06:24, Anthony Ziebell wrote:
Is it true XHTML 1.1 supports modularization and thus, ARIA, except for
the role attribute / values?
I'm not sure I understand the question.
"Modularization", in XHTML's case, refers to the splitting of XHTML
itself into modules. This allows the definition of profiles of XHTML by
adding modules together or the definition of compound "XHTML family"
schema that mix a selection of XHTML modules with elements, attributes,
and entities from other namespaces. See:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-html-in-xml-19990224/#mods
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/introduction.html#s_intro_whatismod
XHTML 1.1 is a profile of XHTML defined by adding XHTML modules together.
A strictly conforming XHTML 1.1 document cannot include ARIA attributes:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xhtml11-20010531/conformance.html#strict
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/conformance.html#docconf
Modularization doesn't mean much either way for ARIA usage, since:
1. If you wanted to mix ARIA and XHTML in an XHTML family schema, all
modularization would allow you to do is ban existing bits of XHTML (say,
presentational elements) from that schema.
2. If you just want to mix ARIA and XHTML in an XML document, you don't
need an XHTML family schema - especially if you want to use XHTML 1.1's
profile wholesale.
XHTML 1.1 (latest draft) allows XHTML 1.1
to be served as text/html as defined in RFC2854 or application/xhtml+xml
as defined in RFC3236.
The first edition of XHTML 1.1 doesn't mention media types:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xhtml11-20010531/
The latest public draft of the second edition (February 2007) says:
"XHTML 1.1 documents SHOULD be labeled with the Internet Media Type
text/html as defined in [RFC2854] or application/xhtml+xml as defined in
[RFC3236]."
The latest editor's draft (January 2009) says:
"XHTML 1.1 documents SHOULD be labeled with the Internet Media Type
"application/xhtml+xml" as defined in [RFC3236]"
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2009/ED-xhtml11-20090106/conformance.html#strict
Note that "SHOULD" has a specific meaning defined in RFC 2119:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt .
Both the drafts refer us to W3C's note on XHTML media types:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/
Which has no normative status, but was a summary of the HTML Working
Group's view of best practice in 2002, and says XHTML 1.1 "SHOULD NOT"
be served as text/html, "MAY" be served as application/xml or text/xml,
and "SHOULD" be served as application/xhtml+xml. (Again, these are RFC
2119 terms).
But this note is itself being revised by the XHTML 2 Working Group:
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2009/ED-xhtml-media-types-20090116/
It is still a note with no normative status, and this time "should" etc.
are not defined with reference to RFC 2119. The note suggests best
practices for serving XHTML documents as text/html:
* They should "conform" to a set of guidelines, ultimately a reworking
of the guidelines at the end of XHTML 1.0
* They should not be XHTML Family documents that mix XHTML with features
from other namespaces (e.g. SVG, MathML, YourMadeUpML).
What rather confuses all this is that there is _another_ W3C Working
Group that is simultaneously defining how text/html and XML features in
the XHTML namespace ( http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/ ) should actually be
processed, the new HTML WG:
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/
This is exciting as it looks like we are so close
to being able to implement websites which have a much higher level of
accessibility.
If you think a major barrier to ARIA adoption is that there is no way to
use ARIA in your document and conform to a W3C Standard, then
discussions around including ARIA in HTML5, the drafting of XHTML 1.2
(which includes ARIA), and the gradual standardization of ARIA itself
are of significantly more interest than any draft of XHTML 1.1.
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
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