Potential clarification of Web Content/User Agent

On 20/04/2017 22:06, Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
> On 20/04/2017 21:48, David MacDonald wrote:
>> "tautological" wow... quite the word, had to look it up.
>>
>> Content provided at an HTTP address which can be consumed by a user
>> agent is considered content.
>>
>> However, the intention was not to consider programs etc. that had to be
>> "downloaded" as content. Your exe file is a perfect example. We tried to
>> distinguish content from the use case where the internet was used as a
>> delivery mechanism instead of postal mailing a CD of a program, etc...
>> The important thing is that web content can be interacted with while at
>> the http address. The thing that makes PDF and now Word documents
>> content, is that they are at an HTTP address and can be opened in a
>> browser.
>
> So only content that is natively supported by browsers or has plugins
> for those browsers available? Because currently then the definition of
> https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#useragentdef does not make that clear.
>
> And on that topic then, are there plugins to render ODF and OOXML
> directly in browser, as a plugin?

Or, more widely, web content is anything that can be displayed/rendered 
directly from a URI without the need for it to be downloaded locally to 
a user's environment first (though even here issues of local cache for 
UAs may need to be at least aknowledged/outscoped). And a user agent is 
anything that can access and display/process web content directly from a 
URI without the need for it to be run locally, of sorts? Still circular 
reasoning, but at least includes explicit mention that it needs to be 
done directly "from the web" if you will.

If that was the original intent even in WCAG 2.0, this would be an 
editorial change, rather than a substantive change, that should be easy 
to incorporate into WCAG 2.1?

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Thursday, 20 April 2017 21:15:09 UTC