[last call] Redundant requirements with user agents

Structural/substantive issue

The specification seems to take no account of situations where in fact all  
user agents relevant to a given baseline offer functionality that the  
guidelines are requiring of authors.

Where this is the case (for example, SVG user agents generally provide a  
mechanism to pause any animation independently of the content, and in SVG  
tiny it is not possible to provide the functionality in content anyway)  
the guidelines should take it into account.

I propose that the baseline section be reworked, to incorporate this type  
of situation. Perhaps the most robust way of specifying this would be to  
explicitly relate UAAG requirements to WCAG requirements, and note that  
where there are (some expression for most or all) user agents for the  
baseline which meet a given UAAG requirement the corresponding WCAG  
requirement need not be met. Note that the proportion of user agents for  
which this needs to be true should be at least as high, and probably  
higher than that which is reasonable to justify the use of a particular  
baseline in the first place.

-- 
   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
   hablo español  -  je parle français  -  jeg lærer norsk
chaals@opera.com         Try Opera 9 ASAP! http://opera.com

Received on Thursday, 22 June 2006 14:34:13 UTC