Re: levels/options considered harmful

At 21:17 -0500 2002-05-16, Dan Connolly wrote:
>regarding:
>
>"Guideline 3. Specify flavors of conformance.  "
>	-- http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-qaframe-spec-20020515/
>
>That guideline is presented as if different
>flavors of conformance have no downside whatsoever.

You refer to http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-qaframe-spec-20020515/#b2ab3d133

There are cases where conformance could be modular. The examples 
which is given is the conformance clause of User Agent Accessibility 
Guidelines.

For example, it doesn't make sense to impose on a braille user agent 
to support CSS colors, or CSS positionning.

Another example, The Process Document is managed as a specification 
and do not have a conformance section 
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process-20010719/process.html


The Guideline 3 which has checkpoints Priority 2, means if you decide 
to conform to QA Level "AA" (should be changed to avoid confusion 
with WAI), you have to fullfil all checkpoints 3.*, We do not impose 
the conformance rules, We say depending on the conformance statement 
you'll choose, you'll have to respect a kind of organisation of 
Conformance rules in the table of contents, etc.

The Guideline 1 says 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-qaframe-spec-20020515/#b2ab3d117

Checkpoint 2.1. Include a conformance clause. [Priority 1]
So you must have a conformance clause at minimum, if you decide to 
follow QA rules.

If you want to make it mandatory for all specs... you can impose in 
the pubrules that W3C Specs must respect QA Level A, as it has been 
done for WAI.


Dan, Did I understand your concerns? or can you make it more precise? Thanks.


-- 
Karl Dubost / W3C - Conformance Manager
           http://www.w3.org/QA/

      --- Be Strict To Be Cool! ---

Received on Thursday, 16 May 2002 23:13:18 UTC