WCAG Definitions Discussed at CSUN 2003

subgroup: Katie Haritos-Shea, John Slatin, Doyle Burnett, Alex Piner

Content

Content is anything that is rendered by a user agent.

Examples of “content” could be:

• Text
• Images
• Audio
• Video
• Animation
• Web Based Applications and Services
• The following items are debatable (to include in this list or not)
  • Authoring Tools components such as the browser ? of authoring UI of Weblogs, and content management systems
  • Embedded components of User Agents such as media players and other programmatic objects that render content in accordance with UAAG 1.0
  
  
  

This definition is expressed in technical terms in a quotation from the normative definition of “content” in the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Recommendation:

“……. the noun "content" is used in three ways:

1. It is used to mean the document object as a whole or in parts.
2. It is used to mean the content of an HTML or XML element, in the sense employed by the XML 1.0 specification ([XML], section 3.1): "The text between the start-tag and end-tag is called the element's content." Context should indicate that the term content is being used in this sense.
3. It is used in the terms non-text content and text content.”

User Agent

A User Agent is any combination of software and hardware that is used to access and render content to users.

These combinations may include (but are not limited to):

• Graphical, text, voice and other browser software running on:
  • Portable PCs
  • Desktop Computers
  • Mobile Phones
  • PDAs (personal data assistants)
  • Web television
  • Large Screen Displays (eg Times Square, sports stadiums, etc)
  • GPS (Global Positioning System) devices
  • Kiosks
  • Other wired and wireless devices
• Multimedia Players
• Plug-Ins
• Software assistive technologies used in conjunction with browsers such as:
  • screen readers,
  • screen magnifiers
  • voice recognition software
  • signing avatars

Web Resources

A web resources is material that can be accessed through web protocols and rendered by user agents.

Web Resources may include (but are not limited to):

• static web pages
• dynamic web pages
• web applications
• web services (and repositories?)
• (.doc, .pdf, .html, .vxml, .rtf, .txt, etc)
• databases
• repositories
• registries

This definition is expressed in technical terms in a quotation from the normative definition of “web resources” in the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Recommendation:

“…….The term "Web resource" is used in this document in accordance with Web Characterization Terminology and Definitions Sheet [WEBCHAR] to mean anything that can be identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI); refer to RFC 2396 [RFC2396]

Web Site

A web site is a collection or combination of linked resources that can be accessed and rendered through a single (networked?) location.