Re: ERT WG: Agenda for teleconference on Tuesday 22 February 2005

As noted at the end of the last call, I will be in a plane and unable to  
attend. So regrets.

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 20:16:31 +0100, Shadi Abou-Zahra <shadi@w3.org> wrote:

> 4. Brainstorm of EARL Requirements
>   - higher-level requirements for EARL such as:
>    * target audience
>    * document format (guide vs. spec)
>    * dependencies on Eval Suite, RDF, WCAG, etc

I think that there are two things that are necessary.

One is a technical specification, that people can use to implement EARL  
assuming that they know the technical stuff around it. The fact that the  
current RDF schema is invalid (there are some mismatched tags so it is not  
even well-formed XML) is a problem in this repsect, but one that should be  
very easy to fix.

The other is introductory and explanatory material, such as the use cases  
and scenarios. I would like to see, in the medium term, those things  
seperated from the specificationitself, although it is important that we  
work on them, since they drive requirements (in my experience they are  
often better than a formal requirements document) and are important for  
identifying the audience of our overall explanatory efforts.

I don't think there are a lot of dependencies for EARL - clearly it  
depends on RDF, but as a general-purpose quality assurance framework it  
doesn't have any intrinsic links with WCAG or its test suites - they just  
happen to be use cases developed by historical chance. Still, in order to  
use EARL effectively with WCAG there are some things that we would like  
WCAG to do, like publish a formal RDF schema of their requirements  
(success criteria, checkpoints, etc).

This is easy enough if they don't do it - as was the case with WCAG 1,  
where I pulished my own for personal use. I think Sean did too, although  
only in N3 - but helpful if they do - see the thread in which Andrew  
identified (again) the need for describing tests.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile - Vice Presidente - Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org                      http://www.sidar.org
     (chaals is available for consulting at the moment)

Received on Tuesday, 22 February 2005 00:10:43 UTC