[whatwg] Dynamic content accessibility in HTML today

[Charles McCathieNevile]

On Thu, 24 Aug 2006 20:16:14 +0200, James Graham <jg307 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> 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),

Yes, if you want to know how this is expected to work I guess you should.  
The benefit is that it might be 8 months between new specs, and 8 days  
between new inventions and people suffering because they have no way to  
use them, and an auto-discovery mechanism that doesn't always rely on  
writing a new spec would be an improvement on that.

> 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.

The RDF solution at least provides for a workable auto-discovery  
mechanism. Which means that vendors don't just spend their time chasing  
down other vendors' extensions manually. I'm not sure that the gap between  
the two is worthwhile. In principle I would rather see things invalid than  
magic lists. In practice I suspecting I am making water towards the  
oncoming wind - vendors would do it anyway - which is why I support the  
RDF thing.

(Plus I am one of those people who can write RDF easily, or find a tool to  
do it for me, but cannot stomach anything that says "first just write a  
script"...)

Cheers

Chaals

-- 
   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
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