Re: RE: working definition of baseline

lguarino@adobe.com writes:
 > 
 > When I read this, the second sentence feels like we are requiring 
 > authors to use all the technologies in the baseline, that is,  that 
 > somehow we are disallowing the case that a particular website only 
 > uses one of the technologies in the baseline and there is a user agent 
 > that only supports that technology.

Yes, we are, and should be, disallowing that case. If there is a
declared baseline consisting of 2 technologies and the content uses only 1 of
them, then the declared baseline is a superset of the real baseline
and hence not the baseline for the content. In other words, the
baseline is supposed to be the minimum set of technologies required by
the content to be supported in user agents; it can't be a more
inclusive list, otherwise it isn't the baseline for the content.

 >  For defining baseline, if we are 
 > going to include this sort of information, it probably needs to be 
 > turned inside out: if you use a technology that is not in the 
 > baseline, user agents will not allow users to perceive the information 
 > in and operate the functionality, etc.

But this is not true. If I use a technology that is not in the
baseline in writing my content, and it degrades gracefully, then the
content will still be perceivable/operable.

The idea of the baseline is to list exactly those technologies which
the content requires, at aminimum, in order to be perceivable/operable.

I also agree that the second sentence of the proposed definition
re-introduces material that was moved into the conformance proposal,
but as this is the most important implication of the concept of
baseline I didn't think the definition would be either clear or
complete without it. Someone could read the first sentence and still
have no clue as to what a baseline was or what it was intended to
achieve, and could misinterpret the guidelines accordingly.

Thoughts?

Received on Saturday, 7 May 2005 00:50:47 UTC