Re: Fw: having slept on the conversation....

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Lisa Seeman wrote:

>
>
> i have a deep concern about the direction of the scope argument.
>
> IE: that people can claim a site conformance based on new content being accessible

To avoid ambiguity, we need to distinguish two possibilities:

a. A Web site consists of content written before time t, and content
written after time t. The author is allowed to claim conformance for the
entire site notwithstanding that only content written or revised after
time t meets the success criteria at the level at which conformance is
asserted.

b. In the same scenario as above, the author can make a conformance claim,
but not for the entire site - only for that portion of it consisting of
content created or revised after time t.

I would argue that (b) should be allowed, that is, a properly scoped
conformance claim should be admissible, but for the reasons that Lisa
provides I would object to (a). In other words I think a claim which is
explicitly limited in scope to a subset of the content on a site should be
allowed, irrespective of how that subset is defined, but that a claim of
conformance for the entire site should not be permissible unless the
entire site does, in fact, conform. I am here freely using the problematic
concept of a "site" which I think is a vague and inadequately defined
notion in any case.

The object of the guidelines is to specify how content can be made more
accessible and to provide a conformance scheme that enables the level of
accessibility attained to be reported as a conformance claim. The
guidelines should not be trying to set policy via the conformance
mechanism; in particular they should not impose restrictions on the
author's freedom to determine the scope of conformance claims.

Received on Tuesday, 13 July 2004 19:04:10 UTC