Conformance descriptions Re: agenda item ?

On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Matt May wrote:

>Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>> <quote who="Matt May">
>>
>>>5. Conformance reporting mechanisms for WCAG 2
>>
>>
>> For the most part, EARL is already working for this. Sidar and W3C have
>> both produced tools which output the latest version of EARL, and there are
>> a number of tools which output earlier versions.
>
>I'm sorry, you're misunderstanding me. I'm not talking about
>evaluations, I'm talking about site-based conformance claims and scope.
>There are remaining questions in WCAG, such as what constitutes a
>resource, which need to be resolved before EARL becomes an obvious
>solution to the WG. That's going to require coordination between WCAG,
>ER, and our SemWeb friends. "Use EARL" is not a sufficient answer to
>this problem.

OK, so that gets to the problem I mentioned on the call, of identifying the
thing you are talking about. EARL is quite happy describing anything you can
identify with a URI - a component in your Content Management System (this is
the level that the IMS and similar folks are using it now), a single Web
page, a paragraph in your page, a collection of pages. It is relatively easy
to describe "anything  produced by the following Web Service" but as you
mention there isn't a clearly standardised vocabulary yet. (This has to do
with the changes that were introduced to RDF between the original 1999
Recommendation and the new set of Recommendations from this year. A likely
candidate is the vocabulary used by n3 tools.)

As soon as there is an ER group I look forward to the discussion
recommencing. I would suggest that the QA activity at W3C should also be
following this.

cheers

Chaals

Charles McCathieNevile  http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  tel: +61 409 134 136
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Received on Friday, 13 August 2004 05:05:15 UTC