On Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:16:59 +0100, Marc Silbey
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Cullen (on CC) is one of our OM developers and he implemented ARIA:
------
"In IE, attributes need a name. The name needs to be defined such that
we can provide programmatic access to it. For example, a name of
“aria-busy” cannot be used in the COM accessor method names
(get_aria-busy() is invalid syntax). Therefore, the property needs a way
to expose both the dash-syntax as well as a way for the COM interface to
access the property. Our convention in IE is to camel-case the name in
place of the dash (aria-busy becomes ariaBusy). Then, we specifically
say that the property’s true name is “aria-busy” such that it is parsed
in the HTML and that get/setAttribute() methods work as expected (in IE8
mode). Because the attribute name contains a dash, the accessor syntax
in JavaScript that uses the format of element.foo cannot use the true
name of the property (element.aria-busy is invalid syntax), so IE
exposes the property via the camel-case format.
All of this is done automatically by our tools that take our interface
definitions (including property and method definitions) and generate the
necessary code for them. Our ARIA implementation did not add anything in
the way attributes are handled. The behavior being observed is just how
IE exposes properties/methods that have a name that contains invalid
characters for programmatic purposes."
------
I understand that IE works this way internally, but this behavior -- that
all attributes are reflected by DOM attributes and that any DOM attributes
(or JS properties) on elements also turn into real attributes -- is not
backed up by any DOM spec, and Opera, Safari and Firefox don't do this. In
those browsers, unknown attributes are only accessible with
getAttribute(), and saying elm.foobar = 'x' just creates a JS property
"foobar" without adding/changing the "foobar" attribute on the element.
Would it be possible to make IE act as if it did this as far as DOM and JS
exposure goes? This would solve two problems in one go -- ARIA attributes
and unknown attributes/properties.
If together we decide that we don't want to allow this DOM attribute
behavior then we can either advise developers not to use it in the best
practices document
This doesn't sound like a reliable method to me -- I would expect many
authors to go by trial-and-error and copy-paste rather than read best
practices documents.
or we (IE) will look into doing extra work to remove the functionality
in our ARIA implementation. I'd like to talk about these options and any
others on one of the next wg calls.
--
Simon Pieters
Opera Software
