- From: Gregg Vanderheiden <gv@trace.wisc.edu>
- Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 18:47:22 -0600
- To: <jasonw@ariel.its.unimelb.edu.au>, "'John M Slatin'" <john_slatin@austin.utexas.edu>
- Cc: "'Al Gilman'" <Alfred.S.Gilman@IEEE.org>, <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Pretty good Jason, except where you made the leap to "if there is no standard than whatever techniques says is de facto standard". This is not true. If there is no standard and supported manner then there is none -- and you can't comply with that technology. Not being in the techniques doc however does not mean it doesn't exist. And a technique that is in the techniques doc that is not labeled as standard and supported is also not sufficient. If a technique is in the techniques doc as a standard and supported technique and it is not - then the techniques doc is in error but still the technique does not satisfy the guidelines. The only way to satisfy the guidelines or their success criteria is to satisfy the success criteria. The techniques docs just document known ways to do that (and the GUIDE doc also helps you understand the SC.) But things can satisfy the SC that are NOT in the techniques doc. And there will be techniques in the techniques doc that do not satisfy the SC. So the GUIDE and techniques docs remain informative - and not normative. Gregg -- ------------------------------ Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D. Professor - Ind. Engr. & BioMed Engr. Director - Trace R & D Center University of Wisconsin-Madison -----Original Message----- From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Jason White Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2005 6:33 PM To: John M Slatin Cc: Al Gilman; w3c-wai-gl@w3.org Subject: RE: Key results and recommendations from Face to Face John M Slatin writes: > > Thanks, Al. This is a beautiful exposition and it helps me very much. > > There is nothing in WCAG 2.0 as vague as "structure your content." We > are striving for success criteria that are written as testable > assertions about content in its encoded form, and to provide sufficient > and testable techniques for encoding that content. True, but here's the issue. Gregg quite ingeniously suggested tightening the success criteria to demand that structure, text equivalents, lexicographical information and other aspects of the content required by the guidelines should be encoded in a "standard and supported manner". The idea was that what "standard and supported" meant could be construed as an empirical question to which the techniques documents would provide answers for each format or language. "Standard and supported" would then be defined in terms of conformance to technical specifications, and the adoption of practices supported "in the field" (Gregg's words, if I recall correctly), either by implementations or as suggested by documents such as WCAG techniques. Another way of interpreting the proposal, however, would be to argue that it effectively makes the techniques normative: where there is no established practice or implementation experience that settles what "standard and supported" amounts to, the techniques would become de facto authoritative. This could be seen as crossing the demarcational line between informative and normative by effectively requiring the techniques documents to be followed in order to satisfy the "standard and supported" requirement. The proposal thus transforms the problem to that of providing sufficiently applicable and testable criteria for determining whether a particular technique for applying a success criterion using a given technology is "standard and supported"; and I think the question is still open whether this can be made workable.
Received on Friday, 25 March 2005 00:47:34 UTC