Hey Michael,
I partly agree. The WCAG IDs would be better if there was any documentation
about them. I only know about them because EARL requires all IDs to be
URIs. If it wasn't required I wouldn't have used them though, because it
can be problematic to rely on undocumented features. There is even less of
a guarantee that those wouldn't change for 2.1 than there is the numbers.
Also, several of the WCAG translations didn't accurately copy all of the
IDs, which creates some unfortunate inconsistency.
The ACT TF put an example of how to use WCAG 2 IDs in the ACT Rules Format,
for those who are interested:
https://www.w3.org/TR/act-rules-format/#appendix-data-example (2nd and 3rd
example).
W
On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 3:41 PM, Michael Cooper <cooper@w3.org> wrote:
> On 20/09/2017 9:10 AM, David MacDonald wrote:
>
> If we do that I think should start referring to the numbers as ID#s. Its a
> change in layout because WCAG 2 used the numbers as "Outline" mode to order
> them. The new layout would be changing that "ID" mode as unique identifiers
> but not the common way of referring to them by lay people. I'm OK with that
> change but I think we should articulate it.
>
> We should not refer to numbers as IDs. Numbers are a terribly brittle way
> to ID something, and we have much better IDs already in the spec. In WCAG
> 2.0 the ID for SC 1.1.1 is "text-equiv-all"; in WCAG 2.1 we base the ID on
> the SC title so it's "non-text-content". In both cases there is a lot of
> infrastructure built around those IDs, and no infrastructure built around
> the numbers.
>
> I know I'm going to lose the debate on numbers, where my position is that
> they are meaningless and we should number things as appropriate to *this*
> spec, but we should not attempt to solve concerns with numbers by declaring
> them as IDs when they are not and we already have better, more stable IDs.
>
> Michael
>
--
*Wilco Fiers*
Senior Accessibility Engineer - Co-facilitator WCAG-ACT - Chair Auto-WCAG
