RE: Relationship to other WCAG in BP2 draft

Sean,
Thanks for teaching me a new verb: elide. 

I agree to your and Alan's proposed edit, though I wouldn't call it
name-dropping since the goals are honest and do translate to real best
practices. But if WCAG is moving on to device-independent focus then the
relationship to the BP may be getting less focused as well. Regardless,
the BP will continue to focus on usability.

On testability: I have proposed a criteria for recommendation inclusion,
that they be testable, at least manually (preferably automatically).
There are enough testable recommendations to consider I believe, and it
will help get BP2 done sooner.

I agree that telling developers "test your product" doesn't add much.
But making recommendations that are backed up by tools such as the
MobileOK Checker (even if I would tweak it a little bit) does add a
whole lot.

Best regards,
Bryan Sullivan | AT&T

-----Original Message-----
From: public-bpwg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-bpwg-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Sean Owen
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2008 9:08 AM
To: achuter.technosite@yahoo.com
Cc: MWI BPWG Public
Subject: Re: Relationship to other WCAG in BP2 draft


On Feb 18, 2008 3:41 AM, Alan Chuter <achuter@technosite.es> wrote:
>
> The "1.5 Relationship to other Best Practices and recommendations"
> section says "These recommendations follow in the footsteps of the 
> BP1, and as such are in part derived from the Web Content 
> Accessibility Guidelines [WCAG]." I'm not convinced of the usefulness 
> of this statement, which sounds like a bit of name-dropping. I think 
> it causes more confusion than it clarifies.

I suspect that BP2, whatever it is, won't begin life by borrowing from
WCAG this time. This statement was far more true in BP1, and
nevertheless maybe cause a few people to pause and be confused. I agree,
if asking me, I'd just elide this reference to WCAG.

> One of the advances in WCAG 2.0 is that it is device-independent.
> Translated to MWBP this would mean making the BPs independent of the 
> DDC. Another is that the WCAG success criteria are testable. While I 
> wouldn't suggest excluding BP that are untestable, it would be useful 
> to indicate in the document which ones are testable and likely to be 
> included in conformance.

My broken record will come out here. It's probably more appropriate for
WCAG to express general principles than particular practices. It would
be nice, but not essential, to tell people how these principles can be
applied in practice too.

BPs, being about practice foremost, has a different mandate. I am not
sure it's possible to talk about "practice" without talking about real
technologies or a profile of some fictitious, yet plausibly real device.
I don't think anybody's suggesting saying the word "iPhone", but not
mentioning HTML, touch screens, display dimensions, etc. seems
impossible.

I also don't like the idea of writing about a Best Practice that nobody
can really test. Certainly nothing like that can go into mobileOK, which
is probably the analog of WCAG success criteria. So we seemed to have
allowed the luxury of writing untestable BPs like "TESTING" last time,
and while that's not completely out of the question, I do think we
should avoid this this time around. TESTING, in retrospect, was not a
bad Best Practice, but simply said little.
Done again, maybe we'd have dumped it.

But then we would have had 59 BPs instead of 60, and round numbers are
comforting. This is why the US named Hawaii its 50th state of course,
and why Puerto Rico simply can't be one.

Received on Tuesday, 19 February 2008 08:52:00 UTC