Re: Issue 556 and 669 (and 506 definition of structure) (long)

Ben said:

>> 1. "Structures and relationships of the content can be derived
>> programmatically (for example, through a markup or data model)"
>
> Tom, are you proposing that we remove the references to hierarchical and
> non-hierarchical relationships?

Tom says:

In the success criteria, yes.

Ben said:

> I think the specific mention of
> paragraphs, lists, headings, tables, etc. is important to understanding
> this guideline and helpful to those who come to the guidelines searching
> for answers to questions like "how do I make tables accessible".
>

Tom says:

There are a few issues here. As much as people need to be able to  
understand the relevence of the guidelines and success criteria to the  
technology at a glance it is more important for the success criteria to be  
normative and hence the guideline be normatively implmentable. To achieve  
this both some appropriate level of brevity and and accuracy. For the  
purposes of fulfilling the guidelines there is no need of the disctintion  
between heirarchical and non-heirarchical structures since both are  
required, ie all relationships. This means that this success criteria  
needs to be supported by John and David's work on definitions. The fact  
that specific HTML elements are also semantic attributes makes adding  
examples confusing to other technologies and potentialy lends people to  
conclude that some of the same issues from WCAG 1.0 have reoccured.

Ben said:

>> 2. "Differentiation of content to imply additional meaning or stress,
>> such as the types of emphasis commonly denoted by bold or italics, can
>
>> be derived programmatically."
>
> Is there a better word than "stress"?
>
> Perhaps "... imply additional meaning, emphasis or distinction, such as
> ..."

Tom says:

Sounds great.


Ben said:

> With regard to the questions raised about whether these criteria imply
> that the archives of this list would not be accessible, it may be that
> this is answered through questions about scoping and whether
> technologies have been used according to specification (guideline 4.1).
>
> For scoping, one could claim that the W3C list archives interface meets
> WCAG 2.0 level one, but that the scope of the claim does not include the
> content that it receives/processes from external sources (i.e. plain
> text emails).
>
> For the according to spec. question, there is no spec that I know of by
> which one might mark up structure using plain text. So, plain text
> content (like the emails submitted to the W3C archives or the comments
> we've been collecting via form submissions in WCAG Bugzilla) would be
> excepted. However, in the case of content written in (X)HTML, not using
> a header tag to mark a header would fail the requirements of 4.1.

Tom says:

Right, I guess this applies more generally. If people use plain text with  
spacing to denote paragraphs and "-" to denote list items they will fail  
this checkpoint. I personally have no problem with this at all. I consider  
much of the authoring issues in ATAG's domain, or at the least scopable.

John said:

> This thread is closely related to the thread about #506, in which David
> and Gregg discuss a revised definition of  structure that was put
> forward by David.
>
> Earlier this week, in a message about the 506 thread [1], I wrote that I
> was concerned that we were defining structure in a way that's too
> HTML-specific (and too text-specific as well, though I didn't actually
> say that).  I'll paste my proposed definition in here for ease of
> reference; the full message at [1] includes the exchange between David
> and Gregg as well  as a dictionary definition of structure that was the
> starting point for mine.

Tom says:

The problem is the overlap between html elements and semantic elements,  
which isn't as immediately apparent (or not available) in other  
technologies. So when we talk about the semantic elements of paragraphs,  
lists and headers it is easy to think of HTML. However these elements (as  
in a unit of information not a <tag>) are independant of technology and  
appropriate to them all. This needs to be made really clear. I do think  
that your definition is definately going in the right direction.

Jason said:

> Using something in the informative section as an example is one thing.   
> But
> if we put an example in a definition, -- and the definition is of a term
> that is in level 1, - then by definition, that is an example of what is
> required in level 1.

> So we should not put examples in definitions that are not level 1  
> examples
> unless the term only appears in lower level items.

Tom says:

I think we should steer clear of this altogether. In a complex and  
spanning topic such as this a few loose examples in the guideline are more  
likely to cause widespread misinterpretation than a clear and informative  
definition somewhere else. This of course means that our definition has to  
be a normative part of the document and testible too.


-- 
Tom Croucher
Co-founder, Netalley Networks LLP
http://www.netalleynetworks.com

Received on Wednesday, 19 May 2004 07:25:35 UTC