RE: John's proposed wording for Principle 4

At 01:17 AM 7/18/2005, Gregg Vanderheiden wrote:

>Maybe we go with this one and then revisit when we have finalized the
>category 4 guidelines.
>
>Other thoughts?

I thought Christophe made a good observation about our definition of 
"technology" [1] and I wrote a proposal to incorporate that [2]:  "Content 
is able to work with current and future user agents, including  assistive 
technologies."
I haven't seen discussion of it. Are we totally off or did people miss it?

[1] <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2005JulSep/0102.html>
[2] <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2005JulSep/0101.html>

For an explanation, here's a resend of my last email (at [2]):
At 01:24 PM 7/15/2005, Christophe Strobbe wrote:
 >Hmm. Content/delivery units is/are encoded with certain technologies,
 >according to WCAG's definition of technology ("Technology means a data
 >format, programming or markup language, protocol or API"), but in this
 >principle we mean "user agents, protocols and APIs", not data formats or
 >markup languages. The semantics of "technology" are too ambiguous.

Good catch. Although, I think by ensuring the content works with user
agents, we ensure that the interaction between user, assistive technologies
and user agents is through protocols and APIs, so I think we can leave it
as "user agents."

Building on Neil's proposal:
Content is able to work with current and future technologies

What if we said:
Content is able to work with current and future user agents, including
assistive technologies.

Even though our definition of user agents [1] is borrowed from UAAG 1.0 and
includes assistive technologies, in other places in WCAG 2.0 we use
"including assistive technologies" to avoid confusion.  I'm happy to leave
it at "user agents."  if others feel that is more appropriate.

Received on Monday, 18 July 2005 15:45:40 UTC