Implications of proposed baseline definitions

Following up on Michael's comment, I want to emphasize two more 
implications of our proposed definition of baseline.

1. It may be possible for a user agent that doesn't support all of the 
technologies listed in the baseline to render the content and operate 
its functionality. However, the content only conforms to WCAG at the 
specified level under the assumption that all of the technologies 
included in the baseline are supported and enabled. Likewise, the 
content may make use of technologies that are not in the baseline, but 
again this doesn't affect conformance to WCAG (again at the specified 
level).

2. We need to introduce "hooks" into the guidelines that make explicit 
reference to the baseline. A draft of this has already been written, but 
it has to be incorporated into the success criteria in all those places 
where they rely implicitly on the baseline. In the past, this hasn't 
been made plain in the document, in part because we didn't have a firm 
strategy for dealing with these dependencies; but now that the concept 
of baseline has solidified we need to make sure the success criteria 
reflect it.

Received on Wednesday, 11 May 2005 01:48:26 UTC