Task 18.HB: Take scoping issue of the current guidelines to the EO working group

The Education and Outreach Group has a task to provide a FAQ for the UA 
guidelines and techniques to support them. The issue 212 raised the concern
about what was the basis for describing User Agents that were covered by the
UA GL.

Q: To what user agents do the UA Guidelines apply?

A: The WAI User Agent Working Group intentionally chose to limit the
intended audience of user agents in version 1.0 of the User Agent Guidelines
to graphical desktop user agents. (e.g., graphical browsers, media players).
In part, this was decided because assistive technology developers were
concerned by the requirements for communication with other user agents.
The WG chose to address general purpose graphical user agents instead of
specialized user agents because the latter generally address their target 
audience well and are not intended to be universally accessible.

New types of user agents will continue to evolve. These will have better 
support for building on the DOM. The UA Guidelines may need to consider
in a later version other aspects of these types.

Received on Thursday, 13 April 2000 14:10:41 UTC