Re: Request to reopen HTML-ISSUE-30

On 02/24/2011 01:09 PM, Edward O'Connor wrote:
> Hi Laura,
>
> You wrote:
>
>> This is the data:
>> http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/ld.html
>
> This is really well put together, thanks! I'm looking through this,
> trying to find information that was unavailable to the Working Group at
> the time of the ISSUE-30 decision.
>
> * In general, Working Group participants were aware that some web
>    authors have managed to use longdesc="" correctly, so I so far haven't
>    learned anything new in the Examples In the Wild section.

No opinion either way on this.

> * Use Cases: this is awesome, thanks for pulling these together. While
>    these use cases are certainly much more fleshed-out than in the
>    original ISSUE-30 proposal[1], I think the spirit of them was covered
>    in the original issue. All eight use cases are handled in the spec as
>    it currently is, either via aria-describedby="" or other mechanisms.

[citation needed]

In years of discussions, what there has been a lack of concrete use 
cases.  What we got, and what we discussed was a total of seven bullet 
points with approximately a dozen words total.

The deciding factor in the decision was:

"The strongest argument against inclusion was the lack of use cases that 
clearly and directly support this specific feature of the language."

What we got was single words like "Cartoon".  It was impossible to 
determine based on that single word whether or not it was possible to 
draw an accessible cartoon without the use of the longdesc attribute.

We also went further, and said in the decision itself that we would 
reopen the issue if presented with "use cases that specifically require 
longdesc".

> In conclusion, while I really appreciate the level of care and effort
> you've obviously put into this effort, it's not clear to me that there's
> any substantially new information available at this time.

I think that more than an assertion that the "spirit was covered in the 
original issue" is needed here to prevent this issue from being 
reopened.  If you can track down the original discussions, and show that 
these discussions were specific and substantially addressed each of 
these use cases, and show that these discussions were prominently linked 
to by either the change proposals or the objections, then I would agree 
with you.

Otherwise, we now have what we requested, and more.

As to your claim that these use cases are handled in the spec as is, I 
encourage you to document this in the form of a change proposal.  Take 
your time.  These use cases were collected over the past six months, and 
the chairs have already stated that we are going to give people 
considerably more than four weeks to respond.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Thursday, 24 February 2011 19:28:14 UTC