RE: Suggested shortnames for Silver

I’m afraid I don’t feel particularly strongly either way, so long as the ‘traditional’ WCAG style works.

Have we made a decision about WCAG 3 being a ‘living standard’ or whether it will have version numbers? That would impact the need for “-3.0”, otherwise it could be “wcag-3”.

-Alastair


From: Michael Cooper <cooper@w3.org>
Sent: 04 November 2020 12:58
To: AGWG Chairs <group-ag-chairs@w3.org>; Silver Editors <public-silver-editors@w3.org>; Philippe Le Hégaret <plh@w3.org>
Subject: Suggested shortnames for Silver


Up to now, we've been kind of assuming Silver (WCAG 3) will have a shortname patterned like WCAG 2. (The shortname is the part that appears after TR in the URI, sometimes collated with a date, such as https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/.) A couple things aren't great about this pattern:

  *   Most W3C documents use lowercased shortnames, it's unusual to have an uppercase one.
  *   The lack of punctuation makes it ambiguous whether the version is 3.0 or 30.

I would like to address this by making the shortname for the Silver guidelines "wcag-3.0". Thus, the TR publication URI would be https://www.w3.org/TR/wcag-3.0/.


The Requirements document should follow a similar pattern, though in that case I'd like to drop the "dot" from it so it applies to all editions of WCAG 3. Therefore the shortname would be "wcag-3-requirements" and the TR publication URI https://www.w3.org/TR/wcag-3-requirements/.


What are your thoughts? I expect Judy and Shawn Henry not to support this initially, as they would probably prioritize consistency with the past. But I think a once-per-decade major update is the best opportunity to break away from that in favour of something more clear. I think the increased clarity outweighs consistency with the past. (N.B., we would probably set up redirects so if someone tries to go to https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG30/, they would be redirected rather than find it a broken link, so we're not breaking things for people used to the old pattern.)

Michael