UA applicability

In our meeting yesterday we agreed that we would track 'applicability' of our techniques to specified base versions of user agents, and to the latest version of that UA prior to publication of the document.  Choosing only these two touch points makes the task of developing and presenting such information more manageable, while still providing useful, time-based information about availability of features.

I have been working on implementing this into the document, but keep coming back to the question 'what does applicability mean?'.

Here is my proposal, after much thought.  Unless I get pushback, I'll proceed on this basis. 

There are a number of scenarios:

1. :lang is a great idea for styling language specific text: It doesn't work on some UA's, but does on others, and I guess we'd want to say that.  It doesn't make much sense to use the feature in your markup for a general audience unless it works on a good range of UAs.

2. every page should have lang="xx" in the html tag: This recommendation is applicable to all UA's because it doesn't cause harm, and helps future-proof your document.  Should the applicability info indicate, however, whether a given UA actually makes use of that information?

3. you should use appropriate bidi markup: Older versions of Opera didn't support such markup. Nevertheless, the principle is correct. It's not really that use of bidi markup was inapplicable to Opera, it's just that it didn't work.

etc

In short, the term 'applicability' seems a little too vague to be applicable here.

What does seem to work, however, is casting the question differently, and asking "Are there any issues related to applying this recommendation for a given UA?".  In fact, this flows quite nicely if we then introduce or point to those issues.

So I plan to add something along these lines to the introduction:

"In order to improve the value of this information to the user we try to ground techniques with information about their applicability to particular user agents. If there are known issues with implementing a recommendation for the user agents we are tracking we will flag that. We will endeavour to provide details of these issues, where relevant."

"We will do this for a 'base' version of a given user agent, and for the latest version available at the time of publication."

I'd like to move forward on this basis fairly quickly, so please send any comments asap.

Thanks,
RI
============
Richard Ishida
W3C

contact info:
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Received on Thursday, 5 August 2004 15:26:33 UTC