Proposed AUWG response re: concerns about concept of "automatically generate"

Comment:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-au/2011OctDec/att-0031/ATAG2-21July2011PublicWD-CommentResponses-rev20111017.html
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MS1 (related to MS1 on previous public draft): The concept of "automatically generate" content does not appear well defined. In the example where the developer changes the template of a content management system illustrates the issue. How is a template changed or configured by a developer considered "automatic"? It appears the example is saying the threshold of "automation" is something that is processed in an on-going basis by machine, regardless if it is configurable by human. If that is the case, we ask the working group to define what is "not automatic". We encourage deeper analysis of both the term "automatic" and related normative text.

Relevant URI:
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http://www.w3.org/WAI/AU/2011/ED-IMPLEMENTING-ATAG20-20111014/#def-Content-Generation

Proposal:
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<Ed>If you get down to it, almost everything that a computer does was at some time specified by a person (the developer) in the form of if-then statements. Some of those things seem really automated because they were specified long ago (e.g., what a browser should do when it sees <html>), others are newer (e.g., a revamp of the way a social network automatically displays user profiles in a "home page"). 

Still, an evaluation of anything has to be done at some point in time so talking too much about the developer being a person (who could presumably mess things up in the future, or not) isn't that helpful. 
</Ed>

Proposed rewording:

content generation (content authoring, content editing)
The act of specifying the actual web content that will be rendered, played or executed by the end-user's user agent. While the precise details of how content is created in any given system may vary widely, responsibility for the generation of content can be divided as follows: 
- author generated content: Content that an author is fully responsible for. The author may only be responsible down to a particular level (e.g., when asked to type a text label, the author is responsible for the text but not for how the label is marked up; when typing markup in a source editing-view, the author is not responsible for the text encoding used (UNICODE, etc)).
- automatically generated content: Content that developer-programmed functionality is fully responsible for (e.g., what markup to output when an author requests to start a new document, automatically correcting markup errors). 
- third-party content generation: Content that a third-party author is responsible for (e.g., community shared templates).
- hybrid content generation: When responsibility for content generation is shared. For example, an author requests an interactive object be placed on their page (e.g., a photo album), the authoring tool applies an automated template, but the resulting content includes placeholders and requires input from the author to be complete.





Cheers,
Jan

Received on Friday, 28 October 2011 20:44:54 UTC