RE: addition proposal, GL 4.2

I'm uncomfortable with a proposal to say something about plugins, because the differentiation between "browser" and "plugin" is somewhat a characteristic of the present time which I think will disappear. It's also somewhat HTML-centric since I think most other content types don't render included content via a mechanism that we would consider a plugin. Joe points out that even across operating systems in the present day the situation may vary.

In my opinion the entire issue is covered by the baseline. When you choose a baseline, you assume the user agent is capable of rendering the content, by definition. Whether the user agent requires a plugin to do so is not our concern. When choosing a baseline intelligently we would want to consider widespread availability of user agents capable of rendering the content in an accessible manner, but we would not concern ourselves with whether those user agents are called "browsers" or "plugins".

For this reason I don't think this proposed success criterion is necessary or desirable, and would proceed with the decision to remove 4.2 altogether. However, if the group feels it is important to adopt this success criterion, we would need to generalize it. As a first stab, let's try:

<proposal>
A mechanism is available and associated with the content for downloading a user agent that renders the content in a manner that allows the content to conform to these guidelines. 
</proposal>

Note 1: I see the problem here that I'm saying "provide in your content a way to get a user agent that can render the content". That could be pretty useless if done badly, e.g., the link to download the Acrobat viewer was in the PDF file.

Note 2: To underscore, this is a _fallback proposal_. My _actual_ proposal is to not add this success criterion.

Michael

> -----Original Message-----
> From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org]On
> Behalf Of lguarino@adobe.com
> Sent: May 16, 2005 9:55 AM
> To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
> Subject: addition proposal, GL 4.2
> 
> 
> 
> Although we have proposed additional success criteria to 
> cover general user agent requirements, the GL 4.2 
> subgroup feels that we may still need to keep guideline 4.2 
> to deal explicitly with plugins and applets. We 
> propose the following Level 1 Success Criterion:
> 
> <proposal>
> When rendering or operating content requires a plug-in or 
> applet, a mechanism is available and associated with 
> the content for downloading a  version of the plug-in or 
> applet that allows the content to conform to these 
> guidelines. 
> </proposal>
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 18 May 2005 13:02:28 UTC