Re: Draft of EARL abstract intended for DIWG

> William states:
[...]
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-di-wg/2001Jun/0072.html

Wow, neat bit of FOI going on here :-)

[...]
> My understanding of the purpose of EARL is to record a gauge
> to accessibility not helping to make something more accessible.

Here's how I understand it:-

1) EARL can be used to rate any resource against a set, or some other
brew, of conformance criteria.
2) Because the reports are made available in RDF, they are mergable,
and easily processable. EARL provides the standard framework, and the
vocabulary; no more, and no less.
3) These results (i.e. "the report") may be used for any purpose. This
can include, but is not limited to repair of the resource if it
"failed" to meet the conformance criteria, or recommendation of the
resource if it "passed".

As far as CC/PP vs. EARL goes, the two are not in conflict; one cannot
be used for the other. However, the range of results which are
reported by using EARL can easily be used (see points 2 and 3 above)
to create some kind of CC/PP profile of the resource. For example, if
a page passes an XHTML Basic validation test, then that resource can
be sent to any browser that accepts valid XHTML Basic in its CC/PP
settings.

One critical point that I should note is that EARL is not *only* for
reporting on the accessibility of a resource. It allows you to test
*any* resource against *any* conformance criteria. It would be
practically impossible anyway to say constrain people to only making
tests about accessibility or device independence anyway, so that's a
good thing.

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Friday, 29 June 2001 17:02:36 UTC