Re: validity levels

Hi,

Beware, some (evaluation) tools misuse their "warning" flags to mean 
"conditional pass" (as in "further manual checking needed" or such). In 
EARL these should be "cannotTell" (or subclasses thereof).

Similarly, many other "warning" should actually be subclasses of "pass". 
For example "feature X is valid according to the CSS specification but 
not supported by browser Y" is actually a pass.

Can you give an example of a test (with a testable statement) that does 
not produce one of the validity level values and needs a "warning" value 
instead?

It will be difficult to define "warning" and even more difficult to 
avoid its misuse. Your suggestion has been recorded in the issues list:
  - <http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/EARL10/issues#validitylevel>

Regards,
   Shadi


Johannes Koch wrote:
> 
> Hi group,
> 
> I thought some moments about the validity levels we currently have in 
> EARL (pass, fail, cannotTell, notApplicable, notTested). There may be a 
> need for another level.
> 
> E.g. there are tools like the W3C CSS validator that produce warnings 
> that do not really effect the overall outcome. If there are no errors, 
> but only warnings, a CSS resource PASSes validation.
> 
> Now, how to represent these warnings in EARL? Should we use earl:pass? 
> Then how to distinguish between real pass assertions and warnings? 
> Should we use earl:cannotTell? IMHO this isn't appropriate either 
> because cannotTell means, the "Assertor can not tell for sure what the 
> outcome of the test is".
> 

-- 
Shadi Abou-Zahra     Web Accessibility Specialist for Europe |
Chair & Staff Contact for the Evaluation and Repair Tools WG |
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Received on Thursday, 19 October 2006 08:55:59 UTC