Re: CFC - Purpose of Controls SC

On 14/08/2017 11:05 AM, John Foliot wrote:
> mcooper wrote:
>
> > A better solution is to move those lists to terms, with the ednote 
> either in the SC or the terms themselves saying "we're still working 
> on this".
>
> This is *exactly* the plan moving forward, discussed and agreed to on 
> Thursday's call.
>
> There is a recognition by many (all?) that the initial list is way too 
> long. Fair point. That list needs to be worked on and whittled down 
> (and a number of us agreed to meet on Monday (today) to start work on 
> that). It is disappointing that this was either poorly captured in the 
> meeting minutes, or that dissenters are otherwise unaware of that fact.
>
> Was the CfC released too soon? Perhaps. Is that reason to walk away 
> from this proposed SC? Hardly. Are we still looking to whittle down 
> that list - indeed we are. We are scrambling hard and fast, and the 
> CfC was predicated on the fact that we would have *a* list (not the 
> definitive list) in time for the August cut-off, and then seek 
> feedback from the larger community, knowing and understanding that the 
> list will likely evolve further between now and December 2017.
During the call Thursday I was in principle ok with going to CfC with 
the promise of an ednote. However, when looking at the content after the 
CfC opened, this issue became apparent to me and it was not clear if the 
planned ednote would address it, so I had to issue my -1. Yes, I should 
have looked closer sooner and I might have raised it earlier, but here 
we are.

While I think the lists proposed in this SC are too long for any single 
SC in the normative content, I did say in my -1 that I would live with 
it for now if we moved the lists to definitions, or put the lists into 
the ednote. I'm hearing now that this was the plan all along, but that 
wasn't evident to me, and I would say the CfC was premature in that case.

Another way of looking at why I'm concerned about these lists in the 
body of an SC: We now have 74 SC between WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1, not 
including ones still under open CfC. In my environment, these come to 24 
printed pages. However, the purpose of controls SC alone would come to 6 
printed pages if included. This would mean 1.3% of the SC would take up 
20% of the space, or 15 times the average space required for an SC. An 
outlier statistic like that always triggers me to question things.

Moving the lists to definitions won't solve the core problem of too much 
content for one SC, but it'll move it to a less disruptive place. I 
think people reading the guidelines, and suddenly coming across an SC 
that takes up 6 pages, might just stop reading there. I would. So I 
think including the lists in the SC will disrupt review of the entire 
rest of the guidelines, and that's ultimately why I vote against it, 
notwithstanding that in general I support having unfinished stuff in the 
spec for the moment so we can obtain review. Moving the lists to the 
definitions section I think is less likely to disrupt reading and 
overall review because I think people are less likely to attempt to read 
those top-to-bottom, so even though I don't think that is the ultimate 
solution to the structure of this SC I can live with that for now.

While I know there are other concerns around this SC, I think 
implementing that change might remove a lot of the -1 votes, including 
mine. I would like to encourage review of the SC, so hope people with 
other reservations would accept its inclusion for that purpose. I'm just 
trying to make sure we don't  break the review of other SC while trying 
to obtain it for this one. If we could get the edits of moving the lists 
to definitions and a new CfC out for that, from my perspective we could 
still get it included in a couple more days.

Michael