Re: RE: working definition of baseline

Ah, I see we do have different understandings of "baseline".

I was trying to define "baseline" as a reflection of the state of user 
agent technology, to provide guidance to authors about what 
technologies they could draw on and still hope to produce accessible 
content.

You appear to define "baseline" on a per-site basis, as the list of 
technologies your user agent needs to support to access a particular 
instance of web content. I think you are trying to provide guidance to 
users.



----- Original Message -----
From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au>
Date: Friday, May 6, 2005 5:49 pm
Subject: 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 04:07:42 UTC