no conformance requirements Re: Proposals: Priority and Conformance schemes

Using EARL it is already possible to assert that a document conforms to some
specified checkpoints in WCAG. So enabling this does not require anything of
the working group except that the checkpoints are identifiable by individual
URI's (i.e. no decision required).

The working group could elect to support claims for conformance on this basis
but it is then hard to see what the value is - instead of having a
recommendation standard document which is a specification we will be
producing some good ideas which I do not think it will be possible for W3C to
issue as a Recommendation.

Ways of using information claiming conformance to various checkpoints have
been discussed before WCAG 1.0 was released (and this was proposed at the
time). Since it is now possible to produce and manipulate this information I
don't think there is a lot to discuss.

I therefore propose that the working group resolve that the suggestion that
conformance claims are just a list of checkpoints met is not regarded as a
definition of conformance - either we have some other scheme, or we do not
define confomance to WCAG 2.

cheers

Charles

On Fri, 7 Sep 2001, Jason White wrote:
[snip]
  This is not a single proposal, but rather a set of related proposals.
  I first present the idea in its most complex form, then suggest
  various possible simplifications.
[snip]
  Possible simplifications:

  Here is a non-exhaustive list of variations on the above proposal:

  3. Drop the "conformance classes" as defined above, and simply require
     that a conformance claim list the checkpoints which have been met.
     This version of the conformance scheme could be implemented with or
     without the notion of "essential checkpoints" (see proposal 2,
     above).

Received on Saturday, 8 September 2001 17:47:29 UTC