RE: What does "for example" mean

Dear William (et al.),

I meant no insult to the WCAG authors and I apologize to Al and the list if
I have been "too testy".

The WCAG is one of the best technical documents I have ever seen.  I
treasure it and have great respect for the collaborate effort and
participants who made it possible.

I still think we should take the checkpoints and examples at face value, and
I am apparently in good company with those who do likewise.  Al is no doubt
correct, but I don't care!  I trust people in this group to make reasonable
inferences, but I don't think the general public is up to that.  Having the
WCAG open to subjective interpretation is a slippery slope that is best
avoided.

Now, back to tag trivia, what about summary="" -- is everyone happy with
that? 

-- Bruce

-----Original Message-----
From: love26@gorge.net [mailto:love26@gorge.net]
Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2001 10:49 AM
To: Bailey, Bruce; 'Al Gilman'
Cc: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: RE: What does "for example" mean

At 09:21 AM 3/6/01 -0500, Bailey, Bruce wrote:
>Documents like the WCAG _are_ going to be taken literally, and if this is 
>not the intent, then the authors should write more carefully

Apparently "literally" and "carefully" are, as Al tried to point out, a bit 
more complex than they seem.

What stuff "means" is often in the mind of the reader a quite different 
matter than it was for the author. Does "all men are created equal" 
deliberately exclude women? Are people with otherly-colored skin "men"?,
etc.

No matter how careful we are there will be different readings of our 
product, but if we can avoid being too testy with one another we will find 
a way to make future clarifications more likely.

Whatever "erratum" we issue re WCAG 1.0's treatment of SUMMARY won't matter 
much if we make clear that summarizing is encouraged (in the checkpoints) 
and how to do it includes (in the techniques) some hierarchy among TITLE, 
CAPTION, NAME, SUMMARY, ALT, LONGDESC - in other words "get appropriate", 
whatever that means in a particular instance.

Received on Wednesday, 7 March 2001 11:53:42 UTC