Proposed addition to applicability clause: content purpose

Hello,

Issue 210 [1] is about adding the term "author-specified" to
the guidelines so that, for example, we can distinguish text equivalents
that may be recognized by the UA from those that cannot (e.g.,
when they are in prose). I would like to amend my proposal:

1) We don't need to define "author-specified". It's understandable as
is.
2) We add the provision to the applicability clause. So a checkpoint or
   portion of a checkpoint applies unless:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
It includes requirements about the purpose of content
(e.g., transcript, caption, text equivalent, etc.)
that the user agent cannot <a href="#def-recognize">recognize</a> 
through markup. For instance, HTML user agents can recognize "alt",
OBJECT content, or NOFRAMES content as providing equivalents for
other content since these are specified by the markup language. 
HTML user agents are not expected to recognize that an
image description embedded in a paragraph is a text equivalent
for the image.
</BLOCKQUOTE>

I started to add "that the UA can recognize" to the checkpoints 
everywhere and realized it would be simpler to just a provision to 
the applicability clause. This applies to a lot of situations. For
instance, the user might compose an image using ascii art, but the
user agent is not required to recognize it as "an image" (having
the purpose of an image). 

 - Ian

[1] http://cmos-eng.rehab.uiuc.edu/ua-issues/issues-linear.html#210
-- 
Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                         +1 831 457-2842
Cell:                        +1 917 450-8783

Received on Friday, 14 April 2000 16:48:19 UTC