Re: 5.2

Thanks again to both Jason and Lee for helping out with this-- I'm really
struggling here.

What Jason writes (see below) prompts another pair of questions:

1. What constitutes an "implementation" in the sense of the term as used
here? Is IE 5.5 for Windows a *different* implementation than IE 5.0 for
Macintosh?  If I understand Lee correctly, he would say "No-- these are
merely two instantiations of the same implementation."  But I'm not sure
whether Jason would agree-- and I'm not sure where I stand either, given the
amount of time Web developers have to spend to ensure that their content
works correctly on both Windows and Mac.

2. If "interoperable" means, in essence, that mainstream technologies "used
by the content" must be compatible with assistive technologies used by
people with disabilities, (a) can we say that in some reasonably concrete
form instead of using such high-level abstractions? and (b) how can Joe and
Josephine Web Developer know if they meet this criterion if they don't have
access to a wide variety of assistive technologies?

A third question just popped into my head: are we engaging in circular
reasoning in the way we talk about interoperability here? It's my
understanding that "Robust" (our keyword for the principle expressed by
Guideline 5) might be translated as "Interoperable."  If that's correct,
then we can't use the word "interoperable" in checkpoints or success
criteria whose purpose is to define what "interoperable" means.

John
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason White" <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
To: "John Slatin" <john_slatin@forum.utexas.edu>
Cc: "'Lee Roberts'" <leeroberts@roserockdesign.com>; <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 28, 2002 6:34 PM
Subject: Re: 5.2


> John Slatin writes:
>  >
>  > Here's a slight reworking that does little more than simplify the
syntax:
>  > == John's reworking of Jason's text==
>
> This is good. My original wording wasn't, in any case, intended as a
>   proposal for inclusion in a draft but only as initial text for
>   the purposes of mailing list discussion.
>  >
>  > Questions:
>  > What does "interoperable" mean in the sentence "There exist multiple,
>  > independent, and interoperable implementations of the technologies used
by
>  > the content"?
>
> I don't know whether the W3C has a standard definition of the term,
> but essentially it means that there are no problems of conformance of
> the different implementations to the specification that would give
> rise to compatibility problems.
>  >
>  > Does content meet 5.2 if it works in Internet Explorer on both Windows
and
>  > Macintosh but not in Netscape/Mozilla?
>
> 5.2 is concerned with the technologies used by the content, not with
>   the content itself. Thus the question at level 2, as currently
>   proposed, is not whether the content
>   "works" with different implementations, but whether it uses
>   technologies that are supported by multiple implementations. If
>   content used technologies in such a way that it would only "work"
>   with one implementation then it wouldn't meet the proposed level 2
>   success criterion. What is excluded is the situation in which the
>   content is functional only with implementation x, whatever it may
>   be.

Received on Sunday, 29 December 2002 10:19:20 UTC