Re: Technique H25 / real life

On 30/10/2013 16:39, Foliot, John wrote:
>> And just to echo what Andrew said: techniques are only informative,
>> so talking about whether or not a technique should be failed does
>> not make sense.
>
> Hmmm... 2 points: one, a WCAG Technique *could* be (or become)
> invalid for any number of reasons (and thus "fail"), and two, I think
> that there was a tiny language gap there by Matthieu, which we can
> certainly overlook on an international list.

Oops sorry, wasn't trying to be a stickler for language purity here. 
What I mean though is: in the thread starter, Matthieu asks if having 
<title> in <body> fails according to this technique...and, even with 
language gap here, the only thing I can read here is "if i come across a 
page that does this, do i fail this particular point in my audit because 
the title isn't in the <head>"...which in turn does prompt me to 
reiterate that you don't pass/fail your page based on a technique.

The technique explains how to use title in the head of a document. If 
you don't do this (e.g. you stick it in the body) you're arguably doing 
something different from the technique. You can argue that you're not 
*following* the advice outlined in the technique, but then ask if what 
you did still passes/fails SC 2.4.2. But not "does this pass/conform to 
technique H25".

What you *could* say - and perhaps that was implied in the thread 
starter - is "should we change the wording of H25 to NOT say it needs to 
be in the <head>, as this seems to work fine even when it's in the 
<body>?"....making this more a discussion about updating an existing 
technique, rather than passing/failing a page.

Or am I splitting semantic hairs here? Maybe I am :)

> Agreed. This however was part of the problem: if we "pass" or "fail"
> on outcomes alone, then the test Matthieu ran, using invalid code,
> met the Success Criteria in at least some of the browsers he used for
> testing: the value of <title> was being rendered as it should, even
> if it was improperly nested/placed in the source code. This *is* a
> problem (or is it? In my opinion it is), and something, somewhere, is
> failing.

It's potentially a problem (if we can find browsers that do not present 
this error correction behavior), but being only outcome-focused and 
looking at the impact on users here and now would push me towards 
passing pages that do this, but with a strong recommendation to use 
well-formed and valid code.

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Wednesday, 30 October 2013 17:11:22 UTC