comments on ATAG2.0

I don't understand why the "rationales" are designated as "normative"..

 From QA SpecGL  22 Nov 04 WD 1.1 Good Practice C:

"Normative content is the prescriptive part of the specification, whereas 
informative content is for informational purposes and assists in the 
understanding and use of the specification. Content includes all sorts of 
different forms — not only descriptive prose, but illustrations, examples, 
use cases, formulae and other formalisms. ....
Conformance of implementations is defined by and measured against normative 
content."

I do not think the Rationales are testable; they aid in understanding of 
the specification, and therefore, should be informative, if one follows
the Good Practice C mentioned previously.

Also, it needs to be mentioned explicitly in Section 3 what it means to 
"meet a checkpoint" in Section 3.    I thought it meant satisfying the 
success criteria associated with that checkpoint as prescribed by Section 3 
(passing all the relevant tests associated with that success criteria?)

  Perhaps Section 3 material should be moved to before the Guidelines, 
since it mentions priorities and a reader might want to know this
material before accessing the Guidelines, and conformance is an important 
subject that should be "up front"

Thanks and best wishes,
Tim Boland NIST

PS  If an offering claims conformance to Level AA ATAG2.0 by immediately 
passing all the Level AA tests first, does it also conform by default to 
Level A (assumed to pass the Level A tests by default, as a way of saving 
testing effort and resources)?   I assume not from Figure 1 in Section 3?, 
but this is not explicitly stated..   What constraints are there on the 
various levels (subdivisions)?

PPS A list of changes from ATAG1.0 to ATAG2.0 needs to be included 
(probably as an appendix), as well as whether the specification
allows extensions

PPPS Any deprecated features from ATAG1.0 to ATAG2.0 (see previous) need to 
be identified;  if there are any, then ATAG2.0 needs
to define how to handle them

Received on Thursday, 16 December 2004 21:41:58 UTC