section 3

(By the way, thanks for your input Bruce. It is valuable to the group.)

The group debated whether we should discuss availability of the tool at
all in october and november last year (the threading in the archves is
pretty terrible but look in particular at email on archived on 12
november). It was resolved at the 12 November teleconference that it
would. All this took place before the new charter was drawn up, and it
was considered in defining the mission and scope of the group in the new
charter.

One of the reasons for spending time on it now is that we are obliged by
our charter to do this task, and we have paid precious little attention to
it since the group was rechartered. The group resolved in the face to face
meeting that we would summarise other guidelines as well as referring to
them in introductory passages, rather than repeating their content in
these guidelines.

As with any issue, it is possible to revisit this, and it seems like a
good candidate for further discussion on the list.

My pro forma proposal, which I personally would not support, but put in
order that we might make progress towards consensus, is as follows:

The current section 3 - accessibility of the tools, refer to other
guidelines documents, and not have any checkpoints.

I am against this in the case of non W3C documents unless those documents
are known to be stable, and have been carefully reviewed by this working
group or by another WAI activity and found to serve our needs.

I also feel that where things are a particular requirement for authoring
tools they should be mentioned in this document, especially if they are
not given an appropriate treatment or emphasis in docuements to which we
refer. As Gregory pointed out in the teleconference this afternoon, this
is not so much doing other people's work as higlighting it.

My preferred approach is that suggested by Jutta this afternoon - to work
out the requirements, write the document, and then remove the pieces which
are redundant, either because they are repeated in this document or
because they are clearly covered by reference. That is apporximately the
process that has been taken by the group for what is now section 2 of the
document, and I feel that it has been successful in producing a
substantially improved document efficiently. 

Charles McCN

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Tuesday, 9 March 1999 18:02:46 UTC