Jason's comments Re: [XAG] New draft Announcement

Jason suggested that we needed to determine whether XAG would become a
guidelines specification on track to being a W3C Recommendation, or merely a
document describing good practices. He also suggested that it would be useful
to have a document that covered all areas, rather than one for accessibility,
another for  internationalisation, a third for architectural requirements,
etc.

I think that there is a need for both (or all three, depending on how you
read it). The Technical Architecture Group (TAG)  is tasked with providing
general information about the architecture of the Web, and I would argue that
the architecture needs to take account of the users, not just the technology.

I think that the current XAG document should be developed as a W3C
Recommendation - a specification that can be tested against, and that is
clear enough for developers to successfully use to determine conformance.
Clearly that implies that we have editorial work to do, and perhaps there
will be structural changes. This is what developing a W3C specification
involves.

The current draft will provide a marker point for the public, and some
history for people who try to replicate the thinking and testing that goes
into such a document, as well as meeting the basic W3C process requirement
that groups publish work every 3 months to show they are actually doing it.

Ian Jacobs, mst recently, has proposed a number of substantive changes to
the document which will need to be considered after the publication of the
draft, and which are designed to make it clearer how to test conformance. If
this document is to receive wide review, then this will happen several times.
We hope and I believe that this process makes the document a robust and
useful specification.

Chaals

Received on Wednesday, 25 September 2002 09:13:23 UTC