Guidelines = Standards

It is confusing but the W3C Guidelines are standards.   Don't let the word
Guidelines confuse you.

 

(side note:  The ADA standards are also called guidelines;  the ADA
Accessibility Guidelines or ADAAG). 

 

The WCAG success criteria are used to measure conformance with the standard
at 3 levels. 

 

The Guidelines and success criteria are normative - that is - they are used
to determine conformance with WCAG 2.0.

 

The Guide Doc is an informative document that is separate from the
Guidelines.  It gives information on the intent of the guidelines as well as
listing what the working group considers to be sufficient techniques for
meeting the success criteria.    

 

 

I don't know what you mean by a middle layer so I can't help you with that
one. .

 

Hope this helps

 


Gregg

 -- ------------------------------ 
Gregg C Vanderheiden Ph.D. 
Professor - Ind. Engr. & BioMed Engr.
Director - Trace R & D Center 
University of Wisconsin-Madison 

 

 


  _____  


From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Bailey, Bruce
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2005 8:18 PM
To: Matt May
Cc: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: RE: Validity as a technique

Please forgive my peevishness here...

> Omitting HTML validity at the guideline level would be acceptable to me.

Did you mean guideline level or SC level?  I missed the guideline
referencing validity, so now I am worried.

> I think the language already in the guidelines document is sufficient
guidance.

By "guidelines document" do you mean WCAG 2 working draft or the supplement
techniques documents used for guidance?

<rant>
This touches upon another significant barrier.  I am fine with calling them
Guidelines, that is what the G in WCAG stands for after all.  And I
understand the point that they technically are not standards, despite how
useful writing them as if they were might be.  And the high level principles
and low level success criteria is genius.  But using the actual term
"guidelines" in the body of WCAG2 in a fashion wholly different from how it
was used in WCAG1 is going to cause a *huge* amount of misunderstanding.  Is
it too late to come up with another term for the middle layer?  Thanks.
</rant>