Starting on Guidelines

I'd like to start the discussions about Guidelines, at an
organizational level for now.

The main goal of this part of the project is to come up with the
"Golden" guidelines from WAI/W3C, that can be used as a definitive
reference by various Web populations.

One of the first topic of discussion is going to be: how many and what
kind do we want to have ?

Do we want a per-capability split, or a content/use split, or a
dummy/programmer/manager split ?

I'm personally in favor of the content/use split, so I'll present a
model along these lines here. I'd further like to separate the Markup
source (HTML/XML/CSS) from the Mobile Code kind (Java, Script) and the
Browsing use from the Authoring use.

That would give four different documents, each talking about different
capabilities and potentially mentioning different priorities or audiences.

Another thing that will help (me) managing the evolution of each
guidelines, from their current life on the Web today (at Trace, in
Australia, or UIUC) to their "W3C WAI recommendation" status, is to
associate URL to them very early on.

For instance, using the taxonomy presented above, I'd like to have:
  http://www.w3.org/WAI/Guidelines/Markup
  http://www.w3.org/WAI/Guidelines/MobileCode
  http://www.w3.org/WAI/Guidelines/BrowsingUI
  http://www.w3.org/WAI/Guidelines/AuthoringUI

A good start from there on is simply for these pages to point at the
existing guidelines (of each kind), and then at some later time to
have these WAI locations hold the master copies, and no longer a link,
when we feel a reasonable merge can happen.

How do people feel about that ?

If that's fine, I'll start collecting pointers to existing guidelines
in each domain, with your help, and add them to the corresponding
pages under WAI/Guidelines.

If that's not fine, then let's reach consensus on what is.

Received on Friday, 20 June 1997 16:19:16 UTC