RE: renaming the guidelines (issue #3 from yesterday's telecon)

I agree with Al's suggestion. This is the "topic" that brought us here and
it's the topic that everyone (regardless of the technology area) that
everyone identifies with.

- Mike


At 11:26 AM 1/16/99 -0500, Al Gilman wrote:
>Title candidate: W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines
>
>With all due respect for the sense of the meeting in the telecon, this to
>me is the best suggestion yet.
>
>Let me try to address the concerns:
>
>"We felt we needed a word to distinguish the scope of this document from
>the scopes of its companions."
>
>There are two reasons why we don't need to do that.  One is how people will 
>understand the simpler phrase, and the other is the respective audiences of 
>the three guidelines documents.
>
>In terms of perceptions, if you say "web accessibility guidelines" then the
>person
>in the street will hear this as pertaining to what we would technically call
>the content of the web, even if we don't say so.  In other words,
"content" is
>the default and may be suppressed without loss of meaning.  And in titles,
>less
>is more.
>
>In terms of audience, we have to realize that the three volumes are not
>really peers.  There is an anchor document, and it is this one.  Everyone
>should understand the content of this volume, including the audiences
>targeted by the user agent guidelines and the authoring tool guidelines.
>The other two volumes serve to amplify the guidelines as required by two
>audiences of specialists.  This volume addresses the most general questions
>of interest to the most general audience.
>
>The title should answer the question "why read this volume?"  One doesn't
>need in the title of this volume to distinguish it from the others because
>there is no audience that should read the others and not this one.  In the
>other two volumes, we need to distinguish the topic from the general topic.
>
>It is not necessary for this volume to be an all-embracing compendium for
>it to have the simple "W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines" title.  It is
>enough that it is the basic volume that all should read.
>

Received on Saturday, 16 January 1999 23:19:02 UTC