RE: John's proposed wording for Principle 4

<Jason White>
What happened to the original idea that all principles should be written 
as imperatives? We decided that success criteria couldn't be 
imperatives, but principles could.
</Jason White>

A change from a soft *must* to *is/are* wording reinforces them as
imperatives. The other option is to shift to an RFC2119 *MUST*

<Jason White>
"Robust" seems as good a word as any for principle 4 - "Design content 
to be robust" or "technologically robust" or "interoperable" or "for 
interoperability".
</Jason White>

*Robust* has many meanings outside of a computing context and is therefore
ambiguous unless an assumption is made that the reader is thinking in
computing terms. Moreover, a user agent can be robust as can an operating
system in that they can be *able to recover from unexpected conditions* but
I'm not sure that content can have that responsibility over and above being
constructed according to specification which brings us back to the
*validity* debate.

Neil.

Received on Monday, 18 July 2005 04:17:00 UTC