RE: renaming the guidelines (issue #3 from yesterday's telecon)

Title candidate: W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines

With all due respect for the sense of the meeting in the telecon, this to
me is the best suggestion yet.

Let me try to address the concerns:

"We felt we needed a word to distinguish the scope of this document from
the scopes of its companions."

There are two reasons why we don't need to do that.  One is how people will 
understand the simpler phrase, and the other is the respective audiences of 
the three guidelines documents.

In terms of perceptions, if you say "web accessibility guidelines" then the
person
in the street will hear this as pertaining to what we would technically call
the content of the web, even if we don't say so.  In other words, "content" is
the default and may be suppressed without loss of meaning.  And in titles,
less
is more.

In terms of audience, we have to realize that the three volumes are not
really peers.  There is an anchor document, and it is this one.  Everyone
should understand the content of this volume, including the audiences
targeted by the user agent guidelines and the authoring tool guidelines.
The other two volumes serve to amplify the guidelines as required by two
audiences of specialists.  This volume addresses the most general questions
of interest to the most general audience.

The title should answer the question "why read this volume?"  One doesn't
need in the title of this volume to distinguish it from the others because
there is no audience that should read the others and not this one.  In the
other two volumes, we need to distinguish the topic from the general topic.

It is not necessary for this volume to be an all-embracing compendium for
it to have the simple "W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines" title.  It is
enough that it is the basic volume that all should read.

Received on Saturday, 16 January 1999 21:39:32 UTC