Re: Conformance to EARL

Hi,

Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> according to the QA guidelines (and common sense) a spec should say 
> what you have to do to conform.

Yes, we should certainly provide possibility to conform to EARL as well as to define what conformance is. However, I think it is difficult to require any tools to adopt other specifications on which EARL does not really depend on, even if they are as important and relevant as UAAG or ATAG. We need to watch our scope and focus on what EARL is, a language to express test results. The conformance must also be restricted to that scope.

It seems we need to define the following:

1. A formal and machine readable representation of EARL (aka an RDF Schema) so that tools can validate their output (and input).

2. A "minimal EARL", a set of classes and properties so that interoperability of reports that contain these can be guaranteed.

3. Tools are conformant to EARL when they produce at least valid "minimal EARL", and/or interpret at least valid "minimal EARL" depending on their nature (writers/readers).

Is that sufficient with regard to the scope?

Regards,
  Shadi


-- 
Shadi Abou-Zahra,       Web Accessibility Specialist for Europe 
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),             http://www.w3.org/ 
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI),      http://www.w3.org/WAI/ 
IST WAI-TIES Project (WAI-TIES)     http://www.w3.org/WAI/TIES/ 
Evaluation and Repair Tools (ERT WG), http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/ 
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Received on Wednesday, 25 May 2005 11:35:07 UTC