XForms and Internet Applications: The XHTML role attribute: small and perfectly formed

What, more publications! Indeed it's true.

The W3C have released the XHTML Role Attribute Module. It originated as an idea from T. V. Raman and Steven Pemberton, was then folded into XHTML 2 (although not before I'd managed to sneak a healthy dose of RDF into it), and has now come back out of XHTML 2 as a standalone module. (RDF intact, you'll be pleased to hear.)

The idea is that it can be used in languages based on XHTML Modularisation, to provide information about the purpose of some part of a web page. (The problem with using @class is that you can't be sure whether the author really means what they say. It's not the author's fault...it's just that @class has been used for many things over the years.)

@role has already been well received by both the accessibility community and mobile operators producing content for small devices. Indeed Firefox is already implementing and supporting the attribute.

And it has to be said that it's an ideal spec...one attribute, a few values, a little bit of prose, and then convey the entire idea in one example:


<ul role="navigation wai:sitemap">
    <li href="downloads">Downloads</li>
    <li href="docs">Documentation</li>
    <li href="news">News</li>
</ul>

In fact, the spec is so compact that the list of editors is the longest part. :)

But as you can see, you really don't need much more than this one example to immediately see that role can be used for many purposes; from creating accessible content, to triggering server-side transformations of content prior to multi-device delivery.

I'm looking forward to seeing other uses of this simple idea, and complementary work to produce a taxonomy for accessible components is already well advanced, thanks to Lisa Seeman and Richard Schwerdfeger's efforts.

Postscript: If you work in the area of accessibility, then you are probably already aware that Raman has had far too much press coverage this week. I won't draw attention to it, since it will only encourage him. Instead, here is a link to a picture of his talented dog Hubble, flying an aeroplane. More pictures are here.