- From: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 18:24:54 +0100
- To: Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>
- CC: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, public-html@w3.org, W3C WAI-XTECH <wai-xtech@w3.org>, wai-liaison@w3.org
Steven Faulkner wrote: > hi J graham, > > >That doesn't seem so far away from many other non-machine checkable >> conformance requirements in the spec. > > > Seems like a good reason to revisit any examples of requirements in > the spec and provide requirements that are practical to independently > test conformance , rather than make requirements that cannot be tested > by anybody other than the author. That would appear to preclude requirements such as: "The alt attribute [...] must contain a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose as the image. What is to be considered an equivalent purpose, depends on the way an image is used."[1] Since only the original author can be a definitive judge of the purpose of the image. I would argue that requiring knowledge of author intent does not prevent a conformance requirement being useful; such requirements can still increase the fraction of authors who do something well; this is the social engineering aspect of conformance requirements that I have previously discussed [2]. It does prevent services with no access to out-of-band information handing out badges to proclaim conformance, but it's not clear to me what the value of such badges is supposed to be, especially in the case where the conformance requirements have been watered down to meet the the capabilities of badge-providers. What _is_ dangerous is trying to encourage certain practices that require knowledge of the author's intent using conformance requirements that do not. In this case it is likely that the author will optimise to the letter of conformance and fail to actually achieve the goal that the spec authors had in mind. [1] http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/Action54AltAttribute [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008May/0242.html -- "Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?" -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Received on Wednesday, 21 May 2008 17:25:49 UTC