Re: What does WCAG mean by "a set of Web units"

On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 05:28:14PM -0400, boland@nist.gov wrote:
> 
> Thanks.  If this is a normative definition, how can it be objectively and 
> uniformly determined (measured) which web units are "related in purpose or 
> function", and which are not?
That's the problem with this proposal. Also, as was pointed out in earlier
contributions to this thread, the term "Web site" suffers from the same lack
of clarity and precision. For example, the Web site of a university department
may be hosted on a larger, faculty server. For the people who maintain them,
the departmental "pages" comprise an independent Web site, due to
administrative boundaries and the division of responsibility for maintenance
of the content. However, a visitor browsing the content might well consider
all of the faculty pages (including this and other departments) to be a single
Web site as they share a common style, are reachable from the same starting
point, etc. Whether the fact that content is spread across multiple servers
with different domain names makes it one Web site or two is likewise unclear.
Stylistic differences in the organization of content can also add to the
case for concluding that it is composed of two or more "sites".

Thus I think the best strategy for WCAG is not to rely normatively on an
ambiguous term such as "Web site". Rather, I think the administrative
definition is better, based on conformance claims, as proposed in my
contribution yesterday. Specifically, we first aggregate all inter-linked Web
units for which conformance is claimed by a single entity, then we take this
as the set of Web units for purposes of consistency requirements.

Received on Saturday, 19 August 2006 01:04:01 UTC