Extension conflict/compatibility requirement

Hi all,

On the working group call this week there were a couple of interesting 
points raised regarding extensions that require further discussion. We 
also wish to engage other people on the list who were not on the call, 
and make sure that they are aware of some of the finer points and able 
to express an opinion here on the list.

To sum up, two main 'themes' in our extension framework are extension 
compatibility, and the need to reduce, minimise or indeed remove any 
conflict between extensions.

NOTE: As a thought experiment, one possible way to do that would be to 
have a 'MonoSpec' extension which combined the output from all TFs 
(Mobile/Cognitive/Low Vision) in a single spec. Potentially where care 
is taken to ensure that these extension SCs are fully compatible with 
each other there may be less 'conflict'.

The 'PolySpec' extension approach would involve taking the SCs from each 
group and placing them in separate docs that conformance claims would be 
written against individually.

While in principle, the contents of these docs would be more or less the 
same, the potential for conflict if there is only a 'MonoSpec' may be 
reduced. If only because a valid conformance claim would need to be 
written against it in toto. Also this approach would mean that devs 
would have to satisfy the success criteria in the MonoSpec fully, even 
if some are outside of the developers immediate area of interest. So in 
short could be a good way of conditioning developers to consider other 
user needs - rather than thinking "I need to make my content conform to 
just mobile, or low vision success criteria etc".

Regarding extension conflict, in our current draft 'WCAG Extensions 
Framework' document it states: [2]

"Ensure that all WCAG extensions are compatible with each other
Extensions must not conflict with each other. This is important for the 
purpose of enabling content providers to implement support for more than 
one extension. For this reason will be critically important for group 
members working on different extensions to maintain good communication 
about extension work in progress."

There are a couple of questions/points that arise:

1) Should we explicitly call out the need within the framework that 
there must NOT be conflict between extensions? It has been pointed out 
(rather practically) that it just may not be possible to avoid conflict 
with our extensions.

2) If we do explicitly call out this issue in our framework, it may help 
focus working group attention on carefully finding where there are 
conflicts in extensions (between there own group and others).

3) On a more granular level how do you think the framework should even 
define conflict?

4) Obviously while spec fragmentation is a concern inherent in the 
extensions discussion a final thought is the basic question; Is conflict 
always inherently bad? Can positive conflict or friction between various 
user requirements result in the end in better content, better user 
experience etc?

What do you think?

[1] http://www.w3.org/2015/10/13-wai-wcag-minutes.html
[2] https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/WCAG_Extensions_Framework

Received on Friday, 16 October 2015 09:29:36 UTC