device independence authoring wag2 and ua2

Hi,

On the face to face meeting most of us had just participated in the device independent conference. On this conference it became clear to me that UA1 does only cover desktop user agents. This narrowing of the UA definition seems to have been necessary in the last phase of the work with the Ua draft that as I understand it still going on to make the ua document into a recommendation. From the discussions it is clear that one reason to move to wag2 is to take multimedia and maybe also device independence into account. This in my view places an important task on the UA group, namely to work on a new UA draft where the UA definition is not narrowed to desktop US's only. The problem here is that new UA's on the hardware site will suffer from almost a complete lack of accessability. In one of the small groups at the Device independence conference we discussed weather or not the UA document itself should state anything about hardware accessability requirements. Wendy said that much work is going on in the US to resarch accessability in regards to mobil phones, this means that these standards can be pointed to like uA currently points to software guidelines developped by MS IBM and SUN. In short I think this issue of coordination between this group and UA is very important.

Claus

Received on Wednesday, 11 October 2000 20:00:32 UTC