- From: gregory j. rosmaita <oedipus@hicom.net>
- Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 13:28:58 -0400
- To: <w3c-wai-au@w3.org>
aloha, heather! i am in philosophical agreement with the points outlined in your post, in particular the first bulleted point, quote Including text like "at a minimum could lower the bar, to allow product groups to only do that minimum level of work. As apposed to allowing individual companies to define their own minimum, or standard, that they want product groups to follow. unquote this is a very real danger inherent in the concept of explicitly stating a minimal satisfactory implementation of a checkpoint, and yet, when WAI guidelines (such as the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines and the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines) do not contain explicit requirements for minimally satisfying a checkpoint, the working groups have received requests from developers, claiming that the affiliated Techniques documents, due to their informative/non-normative status, cannot sufficiently address what is minimally required to satisfy a particular checkpoint... so, while i share your concern about the potential straitjacketing effect normative minimal requirements may have upon developers, there is also a clear need to define normatively what exactly constitutes minimal satisfaction of the checkpoint in question... for example, what use would it be to simply state that a user agent MUST offer a search facility, if the basic parameters for a search facility aren't explicitly stated? the ability to search is the absolute minimum, but the ability to search is quite an amorphous concept, so the base functionality necessary for a UAAG conformance claim is spelled out explictly in the User Agent Guidelines [reference 1] as for your last point, quote Will products have to implement "the minimum" even if they have "an advanced" solution? unquote, while the answer is, "yes", the reply is not as onerous as one might assume... i know from my experience as a member of the User Agent working group that what the UA WG intends by expressing minimal requirements for checkpoints is to express the functionality necessary to minimally satisfy the checkpoint, and NOT the mechanism whereby the functionality is achieved -- that, as you correctly point out, is fodder for the Techniques document... granted, in order to express the minimal functionality required by a checkpoint, it may be necessary to more explicitly reference specific markup languages, but where the User Agent WG found it necessary to explicitly state base functionality with reference to a specific markup language or modality, the minimal requirements are References 1. http://www.w3.org/WAI/UA/WD-UAAG10-20010411/ --- ORIGINAL MESSAGE --- Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 08:20:10 -0700 From: "Heather Swayne" <hswayne@microsoft.com> To: <w3c-wai-au@w3.org> Subject: "at a Minimum" With regard to the proposed changes for ATAG v2. I have now talked with several Product Groups here at MS, and the general feeling is that they do not like the idea of including "at a minimum" within any of the guidelines or sub text. Some examples of their concerns: * Including text like "at a minimum could lower the bar, to allow product groups to only do that minimum level of work. As apposed to allowing individual companies to define their own minimum, or standard, that they want product groups to follow. * ATAG should not be telling product groups how to implement guidelines. The techniques document should be used to show examples of how a range of products met a given guideline. * "The minimum" for one product could be something totally different than the WAIs suggestion as the minimum, does that mean it's wrong? Even if ATAG doesn't think so, others may. * Will products have to implement "the minimum" even if they have "an advanced" solution? Heather Swayne Microsoft
Received on Thursday, 26 April 2001 13:27:47 UTC