ERT techniques in UA guidelines?

I have an action item from the ER group:

>> Action DB take issue to UA - should they be considering ERT techniques in
their guidelines? have they already? include in techniques document?

I don't have strong feelings that User Agents should employ ERT techniques,
but when the issue came up we agreed UA folks might be interested in hearing
about it.

Gregory has some thoughts below.

Dick Brown
Program Manager, Web Accessibility
Microsoft Corp.
http://www.microsoft.com/enable/


-----Original Message-----
From: 	Gregory J. Rosmaita [mailto:unagi69@concentric.net] 
Sent:	Monday, April 03, 2000 11:09 AM
To:	Evaluation & Repair Interest Group
Cc:	Jon Gunderson; Ian Jacobs
Subject:	UA as an ERT tool (was Re: minutes from today's meeting)

aloha, y'all!
in the minutes from this morning's telecon, it was stated:
quote:
DB you can consider UA's testing tools. in the future they may be doing
more.
LK the ideal: techniques part of authoring tools and browsers.  WL can we
suggest something to UA for UA's to perform validity checks for the user?
LK i don't think that has been part of the UA philosophy.
Action DB take issue to UA - should they be considering ERT techniques in 
their guidelines? have they already? include in techniques document?
unquote
the User Agent Working group has consistently taken the stance that User 
Agents are _not_ expected to fix invalid or inaccessible HTML-that 
burden has been placed squarely upon the author's shoulders, and the Web 
Content, Authoring Tool, and ERT documents are all intended to ensure that 
the content that is exposed to the user via a user agent is (a) valid and 
(b) accessible
that being said, a simple warning, such as that which Lynx issues when it 
encounters invalid HTML
quote
Warning! Bad HTML! Use -trace to diagnose
unquote

would be a beneficial feature for a User Agent, but as far as expecting a
user agent to perform repairs or even an analysis of the page, isn't
something that the User Agent Guidelines currently address, nor is it
something that the WG expects as part of the functionality of a user agent
qua user agent...
a user agent that also functions as an editing tool, such as Amaya, however,
would be required to perform evaluation and repair, but only in editing
mode...
finally, Lynx can-by using the -trace command line switch-be used as 
a diagnostic tool-for more info, consult:
http://www.slcc.edu/lynx/release2-8-2/lynx2-8-2/lynx_help/Lynx_users_guide.h
tml
gregory.

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Gregory J. Rosmaita      <unagi69@concentric.net>
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Received on Monday, 10 April 2000 01:23:14 UTC