Re: [conformance techniques] How to connect to an EARL claim.

The annotea work (and similar ideas have been kicking around for a long time
- see for example the what's related feature that netscape introduced)
provides a mechanism for associating the information with a page without
having control over the page itself. It can be done by making an automatic
service trawl for icons and note that the icon implies a claim, or it can be
done by lots of little robots crawling sites to check one thing at a time.

cheers

Charles

On Sun, 18 Nov 2001, Al Gilman wrote:


  Returning to "where does the [reference to the] EARL go?" topic.


  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-er-ig/2001Oct/thread.html#23

  1. Suppose a page incorporates a brief compliance statement (e.g. 'valid'
  logo).

  a. If the logo is in smart media, PNG or SVG, then a link [leading down a
  link path] to the EARL equivalent can be embedded in it.

  b. If the logo is in dumb media, then the path to the logo can be
  programmed through a semantic wrapper which contains both a 'load
  immediate' reference to the dumb media image and passive links to more
  information including the EARL.

  c. The path through the wrapper can be included as a 'try harder' option in
  OBJECT if we can negotiate appropriate OBJECT semantics with the HTML WG
  such that the ordered search-list method of resource alternative selection
  is recognized as an optimized hint from the author and not the only way
  that User Agents (or servers) may select.  It should also be legal (in
  order to be consistent with UAAG Guideline 2) to select by client-side
  application of preferences-based rules or by interactive choice.  This
  allows the user to benefit from the searchlist order preferences as known
  by the author without having any resources rendered inaccessible by the
  unwavering mechanical application of the author's understanding of the
  preferability of different alternatives, which the author cannot know
  correctly for all users.

  d. The path to site or page conformance claims can flow from a "usageNotes"
  or "accessibilityClaims" or "more about me" LINK to a multi-lingual sheaf
  of documents multiplexed by RDDL.  This can be to information about the
  page or the site or anything else containing the page which is a good
  notional anchor for the meta-information.  Within the EARL view the subject
  of any claim will be unambiguous.  The EARL is about the current page or
  some scope containing the current page and in which the connection with the
  current page is not that hard to trace.

  2. The page contains no "show by default" accessibility or other
  metadata-reference indication.

  All of the above apply, except that the metadata and assertions associated
  with a site or other pageAffinityGroup logo will likely address more than
  just accessibility.

  What is required in terms of rel/role vocabulary is that there be a simple
  'meta' or 'pertainsToMe' semantic defined and that more precise
  relationships be formally connected to this via suitable application of
  is_a and _describes_ relationships.  See Larry Masinter's "that described
  by" URI variant for something which encapsulates the two assertions.

  For example A describes properties of a category X.  B is_a X.  This can be
  articulated without the indirection through the formal variable by
  concatenating the relations:

  B is_a [ arcDescribes [A] ].  Or A _describes_ B.  But if B is to be coined
  after A, then A must couch its assertions not on instance identities, but
  on accept-patterns the implicitly define a class that A may conform to.

  We don't want the semantic of the reference off the normal page to be
  'conforms to' which requires a black-and-white condition.  It is useful to
  link to data that casts information on the accessibility, and not just
  black and white conformance claims.  A clear level here is reading level
  measurements.  Metadata giving measured reading-level grades for content is
  very useful even 'though we don't have a universal scale for measuring it
  or a Web-wide standard for what it should be.  The assertion of conformance
  to boolean conditions is included in the function "gives information about
  [topic]" and the distinction as to what mode of information giving [boolean
  or statistically correlated] should be distinguished in the cited "more
  information" utterance and not in the language semantics of the citation.
  This may be hard for people to get used to, but it is the right way to do
  things.  We can have more precise relationships, but they have to be is_a
  threaded to the loose one and the architectural framework works off the
  weakest.

  Al



-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1 617 258 5999
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Monday, 26 November 2001 06:04:03 UTC