- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU>
- Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 10:32:40 +1100 (AEDT)
- To: WAI Markup Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
In relation to guideline 13: 1. Despite insistance by Charles McCathie-Nevile and myself that authors comply with document type definitions as provided in W3C specifications, this requirement seems to have disappeared from the guidelines as some stage during the long revision history of the document. While guideline 13 refers to using W3C technologies according to specification, the requirement for valid DTD compliance, which used to be given in a checkpoint as I recall, is no longer there; and nor is it mentioned in the Techniques document. This omission ought to be rectified. 2. Checkpoint 13.2? mandates avoidance of deprecated language features. I would suggest removing the qualifying words "whenever possible" from this checkpoint, as it is in principle always possible to avoid such deprecated features. I would also recommend considering in which other contexts qualifications such s "whenever possible", which tend to eroide the importance of the checkpoint, can be removed; the priority is reflected in the rating of the checkpoint (P1, P2 or P3) and it is unnecessary to add unnecessary confusion by further limiting the requirement with such ambiguous qualifications. More specifically, the expression "whenever possible" implies that the author is to make a judgment as to whether a particular feature is widely enough supported, or whether the results of applying the suggested technique would have sufficiently significant backward compatibility problems to warrant non-compliance with the checkpoint. These considerations should be made explicit, as has been done elsewhere in the guidelines with regard to tables, frames etc., instead of using a generic phrase such as "whenever possible", which implies that an author can take an indeterminate range of considerations into account in choosing whether or not to apply a technique, this being altogether contrary to the aim of the priority ratings, which are to be judged entirely on the basis of impact (the degree to which an accessibility barrier results) rather than on convenience for the author, backward compatibility, expense, or other such factors. The same comments apply to checkpoint 13.1 and probably also to other uses of the "whenever possible" exemption.
Received on Monday, 1 March 1999 18:32:47 UTC