Re: potential misuse of warnings (was Re: [ACTION] Warnings in EARL)

Hi Carlos,

Thanks for your feedback, please find some more notes below:

Carlos Iglesias wrote:
> Anyway, I don't see any benefit in providing a separated plain text
> container (not just the dc:description) just to keep people happy. 

earl:warning can be interpreted by tools and is therefore different then 
the text in dc:description. It is a flag, a feature that some people in 
the group seem to be interested in.


> If I get the idea correctly, we have a flag (earl:warning) that says
> "Hi, I'm a Test result that contains warnings.") and then you have a
> related result about the warning. If we make a few changes in the
> example you proposed as follows...
[SNIP]
> ... Then we have exactly the same problem you wanted to avoid, not to
> mention that we'll be again in the "evidence/methodology" loop.

A refinement of this proposal could be as follows:

-> earl:relatedResult points to an *Assertion* rather than a TestResult.

This way tools could look up the earl:testcase of the related assertion 
(=result) and decide if that test case is important or not. For example, 
imagine the TestResult with ID "result2" in your example is actually an 
assertion. The earl:testcase of this assertion could be a test of a WCAG 
2.0 Technique which in turn maps to a WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria. Or to 
stay in your example with WCAG 1.0, it would map to Checkpoint 1.1.

What I'm trying to get at is to provide a way for tools to double-check 
the relevance of the related result. In the initial proposal, the 
warning class did not provide such a mechanism and it is completely up 
to the tool that is generating the EARL code to decide what is relevant 
and what is not.


> My conclusion: if anybody want to do a missuse, they are going to do
> it.

True. But one can also design a language to facilitate misuse or to 
promote correct use (by providing features that the users want).


Regards,
   Shadi


-- 
Shadi Abou-Zahra     Web Accessibility Specialist for Europe |
Chair & Staff Contact for the Evaluation and Repair Tools WG |
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Received on Wednesday, 13 December 2006 12:27:26 UTC