[whatwg] ARIA

[Aaron Leventhal]

James Graham wrote:
> Dave Hodder wrote:
>> The current HTML 5 draft doesn't mention ARIA anywhere.  Perhaps it 
>> should clarify the relationship (or non-relationship as it is at 
>> present), even if it's only a brief mention in section 1.1.
>
> Unfortunately a brief mention is insufficient as aria functionality
> overlaps substantially with HTML functionality and so processing
> requirements for aria-in-html need to be carefully considered (so we can
> answer questions like "how does <div aria-role='heading'> affect the
> outline algorithm"). This has not yet happened.
>
>
Okay, so I can speak to this. I developed first browser implementation 
of ARIA -- the one in Firefox.

ARIA doesn't really overlap with HTML, because ARIA only reports what a 
JS developer is using elements for.
So ARIA semantics should not affect  behavior. Any code for dealing with 
ARIA markup should be strictly in the accessibility API support code 
(MSAA/IAccessible2/ATK/AT-SPI/UI Automation/Universal Access).

A div need not affect the outline algorithm, etc. any more than a div does.
Thus it should not be complicated to mention ARIA in the spec.

- Aaron