New Sectioning for the PA guidelines

I raised this issue in Peterborough and took an action item to clarify 
what I meant by email.

The current document has 5 sections:

A Modality Independence.
B Output Display Independence.
C Control Device Independence.
D Meta-information.
E General Recommendations.

I think it's too complex and it's hard to understand what modality vs
output vs control device means, compared to say, meta-information
(it's all meta data at some level...).

For instance, how does "graceful degradation" (C.1) relates to
"C. Control Device Independence." ?

Or, why aren't "grouping selection in form" and "using list for list"
not in the same section ? why aren't "title for frame" and "alt for
imagemap" not together (they both allow for building a serialized
version of an otherwise 2-D graphical presentation) ?


I think we should aim for 2 or 3 sections:

 A Descriptive information
 B Structure/Navigation 

Under "Descriptive information", I would put
 - image alt, longdesc, video caption, audio transcipt, 
   frame title, abbrev, acronym, alt script/applet

All the things one has to add (i.e. attach) to pieces of data in the
document. 
 
Under "Structure/Navigation"
 - separation content/style, lang, nesting, keyaccess, 
   form grouping, table markup, link phrase, color scheme

Thinds are that are more intrinsic to the document "fiber".

A third possible section would be like section E today: "General guidelines"
 - comply to standard HTML/CSS
 - if all fail, use text-only page

although this could be folded in the intro (for HTML/CSS) and the
conclucion (for text-only)


I think this would greatly simplify the understanding of the
guidelines.

Received on Thursday, 6 August 1998 09:50:12 UTC