[whatwg] Dynamic content accessibility in HTML today

James Graham jg307 at cam.ac.uk
Thu Aug 24 11:16:14 PDT 2006


Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> About right except there is a mechanism in the W3C work for adding new 
> values, which don't make it non-conforming. Given that people are pretty 
> inventive, I think that is quite valuable. YMMV

I don't see the point; if someone makes a value up and UAs don't support it then 
it is worthless, if UAs do support it then it should become part of the next 
HTML spec. I can't imagine how auto-discovery of new widget types would work 
(maybe I should read the RDF Taxonomy spec but I can't stomach it), and I can't 
think of any similar auto-discovery technology that is widely by authors. I 
guess allowing a predefined list of values and vendor extensions like 
role="ms-ribbon" might be a suitable compromise between innovation and ease of use.

> And it can appear on any element, although there is not much point 
> adding it to things that use well-defined semantics already.

Indeed.

-- 
"Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?"
  -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead



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