Guidelines vs standards wasRE: Checkpoint on testability

OK. Here is my understanding:

guidelines are things that people write to tell people what to do in certain
situations, or for certain purposes. SO clearly, we want to produce somethng
that is useful as guidelines.

standards are things that everybody uses, largely because they think it is
helpful if people are using the same things. Cleraly, we would like everyone
to use WCAG 2.0 (leaving aside for a minte the issue of whether people will
haveto do everything listed, or everything possible, if those happen to be
different), so it sounds to me like we are trying to write a standard.

W3C is a standards body, as far as I understand the term. We work to build
broad consensus on "recommendations" for how to do things (like write XML, or
make authoring tools accessible), and publish them. We then hope they become
standards. From there it becomes a question of splitting semantic hairs - the
terms are too broad in english for the debate.

(If WCAG were being produced in the context of Indian federal government
publications there might be tighter definitions that we could use, but they
aren't - they are being published by an international consortium for
international use.

cheers

Charles

On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, Kynn Bartlett wrote:

  At 06:45 AM 12/22/2000 , Bailey, Bruce wrote:
  >Keep in mind that the stated reason the 508 rules did not embrace more of
  >the WCAG 1.0 P1 checkpoints is that they were not objective (i.e., testable)
  >enough.
  >Do we want to write "guidelines" or "standards"?  Do we need to choose?

  I think we need to choose.  Right now we are writing guidelines
  and acting as if they are standards.  WITHOUT PERSONALLY CALLING
  ANY OF YOU NAMES, that seems wrong-headed and counterproductive
  to me.

  --Kynn



-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
until 6 January 2001 at:
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Received on Saturday, 23 December 2000 20:59:26 UTC