Re: Addition to guidelines

Chuck Letourneau wrote
> If the officially sanctioned W3C Page-Authors' Guideline does not
> deliver such information, there may continue to be a need for
> supplementary guides like Trace or Starling to fill in the gaps.

The issue of scope vs. time is not new (see msg
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-wg/1997AprJun/0078.html in
the archives and the minutes of the June 18th conference call at
http://www.w3.org/WAI/group/970618call.html) but since this thread has
started I've been thinking of new ways to adress it.

One new element, at least in my opinion, is the vigor with which
visually impaired users themselves, like Raman, Jason, or others at
the Boston meeting (Judy Dixon, Steve Tyler) are advocating the "let's
focus on the document-encoding" view (or forget the idiosyncrasies of
specific user agents, as Jason put it).

So on one hand, I'm totally in favor of dropping all these "one link
per line" and "BR in TD" element from the WAI Markup guidelines and
concentrate on the quality of the source itself, and nothing else.

In a sense, that's working for the future, which is a position I'm
happy to stand for.

On the other side, as Chuck presented it, there are people that want
to do more than what's just needed, and want to serve the largest
population of today's Web (and therefore for whom knowing the
idiosyncrasies and how to cure them at a point in time is important).

These people shouldn't be left out the WAI.

It's now clear that we want to separate the "pure" guidelines (that
apply to the markup out of a particular browser context, like ALT text
presence) from the agent-dependent guidelines, the question left is
whether we want to present this split using:
  1- footnote/subsections in the overall "pure" document
  2- as a separate document still edited by the WAI group
  3- as a separate document edited by some other groups

I think we're heading toward 1 after the August meeting, but I'd like
to propose that we do 2 instead (Gregg, how about that for a moving
target...).

The issue, as Raman put it, is one of perception, more than anything
else, and one of our requirement should be that content providers
(mainly) and authoring tool makers feel comfortable they can easily
implement our guidelines when they look at them, so the shorter and
more focused the document, the better.



To formalize a little more using Raman model:

> WWW access is a function of the following triple:
> (document-encoding, user-agent, access-agent)_t

I personally think it is 
  (document-encoding, user-agent)_t

(I don't see why we need to separate access-agent for the overall
user-agent in the theory, and I also like to point out that
document-encoding include anything you get from the server).

And what we could achieve is to make WWW access *guidelines* a even
simpler function:
  (document-encoding)_t

where the only think we care about timewise are the versions of HTML
in support.

Received on Tuesday, 19 August 1997 08:12:21 UTC