Re: EARL Pointers

Hi Shadi -

Thanks for contacting me - you're right, this is right up my alley.
Here are a couple of my thoughts:

- Have you considered looking at the CSS 3 Selector specification? If
you're looking to do error reporting on HTML documents, it really
doesn't get better than CSS 3. (jQuery has full CSS 3 support)

- I'm not sure what you mean by HTML Pointers; XML Pointers? I can't
seem to find an HTML Pointer specification.

- Looking at the XPointer element() specification, in particular:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xptr-element/

This is easily reproducible using CSS Selectors (and subsequently,
jQuery). For example, a simple XPointer element() selector looks like:
  someid/3/2

And in CSS 3 (and with jQuery) you could do:
  #someid > :nth-child(3) > :nth-child(2)

Obviously, if this particular specification interested you, we'd try
to make it easier for you to write the pointer that you would want to
use.

jQuery, additionally, supports some /very/ basic XPath. We can support
queries like this:
  //elem[@id=test]/span

But not much beyond that.

- I'm not sure what situations you were looking to use jQuery in
(client-side error reporting?) but an obvious benefit to using jQuery
is that you'd have immediate cross-browser support.

The important thing to keep in mind is that jQuery is really good at
finding elements using CSS 3 Selectors. So this does not include any
other type of content (text, comments, etc.)

Knowing the context within which you'd see tools, like jQuery, being
used in relation to EARL would be helpful. Based upon the current
spec, I suspect that a library that did the following might be useful:
 - A user clicks an error report button
 - The contents of the page is sent to a server for analysis
 - The server responds with an RDF EARL Report
 - The client analyzes the report
 - All error-producing elements are highlighted with contextual information

Is this the sort of thing that you'd be looking for?

--John

On 1/29/07, Shadi Abou-Zahra <shadi@w3.org> wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> It was great to meet you last week in Boston! Justin sent me a link to
> jQuery and as discussed, it sounds quite relevant to our work on EARL -
> the Evaluation And Report Language [1].
>
> EARL is an RDF vocabulary to describe test results. It can be used by
> evaluation tools to exchange test results, for example to incorporate
> results from an HTML validator into an HTML editor. There are many other
> use cases since EARL is not limited to accessibility testing.
>
> One part of EARL is the "Instance Location" [2] which represents a
> pointer to the relevant part of the Web resource that triggered a
> result. For example, if the result states that the fifth image on the
> HTML page is missing an alt-attribute, then the instance location would
> point to exactly that image.
>
> We allow basically any type of "pointer" including HTML pointers, XPath,
> XQuery, or basic Line-Char-Offset pointers. We plan to move this section
> from the core EARL 1.0 specification and publish it as a stand-alone
> "Pointer Vocabulary" (working title!) Working Group Note to make it more
> visible and deployable. For example by tools like jQuery.
>
> I would be very interested in your thoughts. If you have any comments,
> thoughts, or suggestions, please send them to the publicly archived
> mailing list of ERT WG at public-wai-ert@w3.org.
>
> Let me know if you have questions.
>
> Regards,
>    Shadi
> [1] <http://www.w3.org/TR/EARL10/>
> [2] <http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-EARL10-Schema-20060927/#instancelocation>
>
>
> --
> Shadi Abou-Zahra     Web Accessibility Specialist for Europe |
> Chair & Staff Contact for the Evaluation and Repair Tools WG |
> World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)           http://www.w3.org/ |
> Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI),   http://www.w3.org/WAI/ |
> WAI-TIES Project,                http://www.w3.org/WAI/TIES/ |
> Evaluation and Repair Tools WG,    http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/ |
> 2004, Route des Lucioles - 06560,  Sophia-Antipolis - France |
> Voice: +33(0)4 92 38 50 64          Fax: +33(0)4 92 38 78 22 |
>

Received on Tuesday, 30 January 2007 21:55:08 UTC