Re: Minutes from 16 November 2000 WCAG WG telecon

At 2:25 PM -0800 11/18/00, Anne Pemberton wrote:
>At 12:32 PM 11/18/00 -0000, Sean B. Palmer wrote:
>>      Guideline 2. Separate content and structure from
>>      presentation and explicitly define significant structural
>>      or semantic distinctions in markup or in a data model.
>  >   - http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG20/
>Sean, this is one of the guidelines that remains somewhat incomprehensible
>to me. I've been making web pages for many years, occasionally get paid for
>one, and have never yet created a "data model" to do one.

Anne, I think that the "data model" phrasing is an example of creeping
"sophistication" in the guidelines; a danger that threatens to push
us higher than the comprehension level of the average, experienced
web designer.  (For example, we often say "user agents", a term which
is not generally known outside of the W3C/academic-technical world;
nearly any web designer -- 99% or more of them -- will say "browser"
in the same situation.)

To help explain this guideline, basically it means:

      If there is a way to use markup to identify "meaning" of
      bits of information ("meta-data") -- as there are in
      HTML for a variety of tags -- then you should use those.
      If you're not dealing with markup (HTML or XML languages),
      but instead some sort of database system, make sure that
      your database system has provisions to contain this
      type of information.

I think.

I agree that this is one of the more difficult guidelines to
comprehend.

--Kynn
-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Monday, 20 November 2000 15:42:37 UTC