

Re: conformance checker for HTML+ARIA?

Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:10:26 +0900
To: Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20080930111025.GA22299@toro.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp>

Hi Steven,

I would think it'd be doable to add support in validator.nu
experimental support for validating XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.01
documents containing ARIA markup. I read the part of your cited
message where you say, "It also flags issues based on a set of
rules, defined by Henri, on what constitutes conformant HTML5+ARIA
(for example role="document" is not allowed)" and understand the
concern you're expressing. But I think it might be worthwhile to
have a discussion with Henri about whether those rules can or
should be adjusted. And/or we should discuss the idea of actually
defining a spec for HTML 4.01 + ARIA, without reference to DTDs or
perhaps without reference to any normative formal schema language
at all.

As I guess you know, the validation part of the set of conformance
checks that validator.nu does is RelaxNG-based, not DTD-based. And
all the new work that's done at the W3C and elsewhere that
involves writing a schema for validation is not DTD-based, and has
not been for some time now. So as far as spec'ing anything for
DTD-based validation, I don't think that's something that the HTML
WG should be helping to facilitate.  DTDs are an old validation
mechanism and we have for years now had schema languages like
RelaxNG, that have more expressive power than DTDs and are pretty
much in every way significant improvements over DTDs.

That said, there's nothing blocking anybody interested in pursuing
with the validator.w3.org maintainers to add support for it. I
just don't think that's something the HTML WG needs to get
involved with.


Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, 2008-09-30 11:19 +0100:

> There has been some discussion [1] on WAI-xtech about HTML+ARIA
> validator/conformance checker
> david dorward wrote:
> The HTML Working Group is chartered to "maintain and produce incremental
> revisions to the HTML specification"[1], which I would imagine HTML 4.01
> + ARIA would fall under. I imagine you would raise the matter with them
> and see if they would be willing to work with the WAI to publish a small
> Recommendation which makes reference to ARIA and HTML 4.01, defines a
> Doctype and includes a DTD.
> Is this something that the  HTML WG would consider?
> [1] start of thread:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2008Sep/0381.html
> regards
> stevef

Michael(tm) Smith
Received on Tuesday, 30 September 2008 11:11:21 GMT
