Re: [tech] information architecture for interweiving WCAG documents

Hi all,

It seems there are a couple of things that are necessary. As Wendy says, some
idea about how to put together the information in ways that are useful to the
people we want to read it is pretty fundamental, and not really technical in
the sense of managing XML or whatever.

For the mechanics, I would suggest looking at the way the RDF is used to
manage things like the W3C's collection of technical reports, translations,
and so on.

Essentially the idea is that you can describe in a pretty flexible way
relations between documents (or for that matter document fragments - e.g.
technique number XYZ, extracted from teh techniques collection by an XSLT).

You then use rules to drive XSLT or whatever to produce the actual
information you want.

For example, we might describe the entire collection of techniques as a list
of techniques.

Then for any given technique we might say it is relevant to a certain set of
checkpoints. This will be the case in particular with interesting examples I
think - showing people how to do several things at once, rather than assuming
they can put together 14 atomic 3 line examples in a large project.

This can be related to the information I suggested we gather about
conformance, based on EARL. For example, we can declare that a given
combination of techniques can satisfy a given set of checkpoints. And we can
define a new profile of requirements any time we like, based on the material
we have. For example, if tomorrow I get around to writing up a technique of
using http://www.confusingwords.com as a way to clarify vocabulary usage, I
can add information that says it is only relevant in english, whereas a
different technique will be useful in spanish, and people can ask for
anything relevant to a task and aparticular language (something that I don't
think is built into the XML schemas we are using).

This approach doesn't involve re-writing the XML schemmas, but providing
a way to add extra RDF information about given techniques - assuming we can
already identify them (which we can) we can tehn publish the additional
information like a Web page and process it to get results we want.

Cheers

Chaals

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, Wendy A Chisholm wrote:

>
>Hello David,
>
>Thank you for contacting Ken.
>
>Ken says:
>>Pretty succinct advice: manage the information as a whole and write
>>stylesheets to aggregate and/or syndicate the information from/to different
>>publications.  When I say "whole" I don't mean "one big XML file" but
>>syndicate "one XML file per thematic collection of raw information" for
>>independent publications and using XSLT to aggregate from all necessary
>>collections when building a piece of the output.
>
>For more information about the XML and XSLT that we are using refer to the
>list at the end of this message [1].  I think we have a good handle on XML
>and XSLT, but we need help designing how we present the information.  We
>need help answering:  What are the different ways people will use the
>information?  How should we design the presentation and flow so that people
>can easily find the information they are looking for?
>
>I took an action item to talk with Shawn Henry who is facilitating the WAI
>Web Site Redesign Project [0].  The task force is using a user-centered
>design process [2] to redesign the WAI Web site. I would like the WCAG WG
>to use a similar process to design the suite of documents that support WCAG
>2.0.
>
>Best,
>--wendy
>
>[0] http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/2003/redesign.html
>[1] all of these are available from: http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wcag20.html#techs
>techniques dtd: http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/sources/xmlspec-tech.dtd
>xslt to generate techniques documents:
>http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/sources/xmlspec-tech.xsl
>xslt to generate wcag 2.0: http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/sources/wcag2gl.xsl
>source for html techniques:
>http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/sources/html-tech-src.xml
>source for css techniques: http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/2002/08/css-tech.xml
>source for techs gateway:
>http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/sources/gateway-tech-src.xml
>[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/2003/ucd
>
>--
>
>wendy a chisholm
>world wide web consortium
>web accessibility initiative
>http://www.w3.org/WAI/
>/--
>

Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe         fax(france): +33 4 92 38 78 22
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Received on Friday, 23 April 2004 16:00:06 UTC