Re: web resource and terminology

On Mon, 28 Sep 2015, Jean Kaplansky wrote:

> Point being: maybe we need some reminder language that the glossary itself
> had a particular context to DPUB, and that people should not attempt to
> layer other contexts on top of the DPUB context when they read DPUB
> publications.

So much agreement with this.

On Mon, 28 Sep 2015, Matt Garrish wrote:

> To run through your definitions again, from web resource:
>
>> and whose content can be accessed
>
> What does content mean here? A style sheet has content that can be accessed by any protocol. It's like you're trying to scope the RDF meaning of web resource here without stating why this even matters. There's a difference between the content of a file and the content that gets consumed by a user. WCAG recognizes this, but you took two sub-definitions and omitted stating what content is. It leaves me having to read between the lines.
>
>> Essential Content of a Web Resource: if removed, would fundamentally change the information or functionality of the content.
>
> Here content becomes "essential", but the only "content" mentioned so far is the data of the resource. Isn't all the data of a single resource fundamental? Why would any user agent be removing bytes of data? This statement makes no sense unless I go off on my own tangent and assume that you don't really mean the data of the resource anymore but (perhaps) other resources that are referenced by the resource (e.g., images, audio, video, etc.).


Matt, I think this is much less confusing than you are making it. However, we can clarify:

"Essential content Of a Web Resource: Those aspects of the document without which core meaning cannot be conveyed, And which, if removed, would fundamentally change the web document's conveyed meaning, information, or functionality."

The distinction that is being made in the sentences is that, say, a font file that allows meaning to be conveyed in Arial rather than Garamond does not prevent conveying the core meaning (unless the document is a description of typefaces, which is why this has to be generalized). A video, a section of the included text of the document, an audio file, or a caption document, however, would be necessary to convey core meaning. If the CSS goes away, meaning can still be conveyed (presumably, again, assuming that this is a well constructed web document and it is not a web document for which presentation is a vital part of the conveying of meaning).

As for "a web resource... whose content can be accessed through standard protocols" it means exactly what it says: it's extremely general. We are adding definitions for very general things in order to build up larger definitions, because participants in this conversation have been unhappy when we didn't define the building blocks of the later definitions. So in this case, by a web resource, we are including a stylesheet, a textual document, a font file, a video file, a manifest, a JavaScript snippet. It's an incredibly general definition which defines something incredibly general, so that later we can go on to say that a web resource is a component of this other thing we are defining, namely a web document.

Readers don't have to read between the lines to define "content", because content means "any component of the digital resource."

Deborah

Received on Monday, 28 September 2015 14:40:34 UTC