Re: Editorial comments on UAAG 29 September draft

At 12:06 PM 10/6/00 -0500, Jon Gunderson wrote:

>3. Guideline 2 Introduction: Change "Web content providers" to 
>authors.  Seems clear to me.

HB: Much web content is now generated by database extraction. Authors may
do the original design, including frames where the dynamic content is 
deposited. Some content, such as images, from database may fail 
accessibility checks. These may come from diverse sources without the
expected alternative descriptions included.
>
>4. Checkpoint 2.1, what about META comments and other information in the 
>HEAD block, is that part of the DOM? Is there anything in XML like the Head 
>block that contains META information?

HB: XML is a language for describing applications. It has nothing 
inherent that helps or hinders accessibility or inclusion or omission
of metainformation. An XML application needs to be evaluated for its 
provision of accessibility information. The variety possible among XML
applications means that any guidelines we produce for user agents may
be at best of general interest to the designers of those applications.

HB: We have been silent about the new XML application designer including 
what is in the head section of HTML or XHTML to contain any metainformation.

HB: HTML or XML <!--comments --> have no syntactic meaning. The meta
element type is repeatable within the head section of HTML or XHTML 
documents. Interspersed between element types can be comments.

HB: Note that most any attribute="value" pair in any starttag of a document 
tagged to any application of XML is metainformation about that element 
type in which it occur.

HB: XML applications can contain but certainly needn't have analogs of the
HTML META information. In some cases, such as Dublin Core, the 15 kinds of metadata each have element types so named. Including Dublin Core within
HTML uses the repeated META element with attribute pairs: 
    name="..." value="..."
where the values for name are the 15 kinds of Dublin Core. 

Regards/Harvey Bingham

Received on Tuesday, 10 October 2000 21:50:24 UTC