Bug 034: Recommendations not Notes

This is feedback on the following drafts in generic form, not tied to
a particular version with the exception of one detail noted further
below:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/EARL10-Guide/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/HTTP-in-RDF/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/Content-in-RDF/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/Pointers-in-RDF/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/EARL10-Requirements/

According to the ERT WG timeline:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/timeline

All of these documents are intended to become W3C WG Notes, rather
than Recommendations. There is one specific error in the documentation
in the fact that the Abstract of the Guide:

Developer Guide for Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) 1.0
W3C Editors Draft 27 April 2011
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/EARL10/WD-EARL10-Guide-20110427

Says in fact that it is “intended to be published and maintained as a
W3C Recommendation after review and refinement”. I'm not sure whether
the group's timeline or the Guide's own documentation is more
accurate, but I would suspect the Guide.

At any rate, I am not sure why these are intended for publication as
notes rather than recommendations. It seems to me that the HTTP in
RDF, Content in RDF, and Pointers in RDF documents especially are in a
sense the meat of the EARL work. In other words EARL distinguishes
itself by being a kind of modular language whose major modules are
strongly oriented towards accessibility evaluation. The Schema is the
work that these modules plug in to, and though this means that the
underlying schema needs to be of very strong foundation, it also means
that it is going to be quite simple as a data model (or should be,
though you wouldn't know that from the requirements document). The
modules can and should, on the other hand, be quite major pieces of
work.

But we find instead that the Schema is going to recommendation, and
possibly the guide, but not the modules. This doesn't make sense, and
I would urge the group to put this up for review.

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Thursday, 12 May 2011 11:30:52 UTC