RE: 19 May 2011 Agenda =======================================

Another definition for "user agent":
http://webdesign.about.com/od/browsers/g/bldefuseragent.htm

article on web content:
http://www.web-designz.com/tutorials/website_planning/web_content.shtml

web resource:
http://www.webuddha.com/web/knowledge_base/general/web-resource.html

Thanks and best wishes
Tim Boland NIST

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Data ribbon>From Web> enter a URI> and it takes you to the web site and makes all the tables on the page, which you can select and import, with or without live update....

Although this fits the definition, in my mind this is a bit peripheral to what one would think of as a User Agent. I think it would be more accurate to say it is being used like a user agent to get external data....

I think we have to go back to how we arrived at the word "User Agent" years back. If we are honest with ourselves, we'd probably have to say it was a way to include Assistive Technology along with Browsers and we called the two categories one term "User Agents". I think we should try to stay pretty close to that intention, because almost all software has some sort of interaction with the web, and it could get unmanageable if every piece of software is considered a user agent.

At some point in the future perhaps there will just be "content" rather than "web content"... but I'm not sure we want to be there now. I think also we have to remember what technologies were in our mind when we wrote the guidelines.

Here are several definitions.

In WCAG 2.0, we have a definition of "content" and a definition of "web page".
content: information and sensory experience to be communicated to the user by means of a user agent, including code or markup that defines the content's structure, presentation, and interactions.

web page: a non-embedded resource obtained from a single URI using HTTP plus any other resources that are used in the rendering or intended to be rendered together with it by a user agent
user agent: any software that retrieves and presents Web content for users


>From UAAG:
user agent: any software that retrieves, renders and facilitates end user interaction with Web content.
web resource: Anything that can be identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).