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Comment LC-1413: Comment Shortname:; Commenter: David Keech <david.keech@bsi-global.com> on behalf of British Standards Instution, London, UK; Message-id:; Section of the document concerned:

or; Refinement of the section concerned:; Status:
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Commenter's response (URI):; Comment:
9 Comments on Appendix A - Glossary (Normative). This section should be re-written (preferably by a standards editor). Almost every definition is inaccurate, inappropriate or unnecessary. Several are simply incorrect. Starting just with those beginning with
A...

Definition of acronym is incorrect (relates to definition of abbreviation and initialism). An acronym is "A word formed from the initial letters or parts of other words" (SOED). An initialism is a subset of this, being formed from initials. Missing out the words 'parts of other words' is both incorrect and makes initialism and acronym identical.

Definition of "activity where timing is essential". 'Timing' should be defined for clarification (or better described in the definition).

Definition of "analog, time-dependent input" - This is 'analog, time-dependent movement', presumably as opposed to "digital, time dependent movement". Whilst not being very clear, adding a definition which constrains this to a very specific meaning in the context of a pointing device may not be useful. The wording should stand on its own as English text, and is not proper to a definition section.

Definition of ASCII art. It is assumed that an image rendered from many small images would classify as ASCII art (examples exist). The spatial arrangement is therefore of glyphs (or similar small sized graphical objects), not characters - their rendition is what provides the pseudo-photographic output.

Definition of "authored unit" (and implicitly "authored component"). See comments above about confusion between authored unit, component and web unit)

Other errors include: Re-definition of text (SOED: the wording of something written or printed). Unicode is defined by the Unicode Consortium (www.unicode.org) and no longer aligns with ISOIEC 10646-1 (or 106464, whatever that is supposed to be!)

Some definitions (eg Luminosity contrast ratio) are in the vein of defining pi as 22/7 - input from the relevant standards body (eg CIE) could have avoided these basic errors. In several places, values are referred to as RGB without any reference to colour spaces. Many definition would be much improved by using the same word definitions as are used in other Standards, where similar terms are correctly defined, and then simply referred to the appropriate Standard in the definition (or worst case by repeating verbatim the wording used in the Standard).; Related issues: 878 IS PARENT
(space separated ids); WG Notes: [EDITORZ] Discussed in the 01 March 2007 telecon: unanimous consent to close with David's and Christophe's edits. http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/03/01-wai-wcag-minutes.html @@ Gregg to look for alternative examples for the analog, time-dependent input definition {partial accept} DONE change "characters" to "characters or glyphs" in ASCII ART DONE update the definition of "acronym" to read, "abbreviated form made from the initial letters or parts of other words (in a name or phrase) which may be pronounced as a word" (and update the response to reflect this change) Discussed in the 10 May 2007 telecon: Accepted by Unanimous Consent http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2007/05/10-wai-wcag-minutes.html; Resolution: We appreciate responses of people in the standards field and have received much input which has helped us arrive at the definitions we currently have. We have taken into consideration your comments and have made the following changes: The definition of acronym now reads "abbreviated form made from the initial letters or parts of other words (in a name or phrase) which may be pronounced as a word Example: NOAA is an acronym made from the initial letters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States." Timing: This is the ordinary dictionary definition of 'timing'. By policy we don't define words that are used in their ordinary fashion. "analog, time dependent": We have removed this term from the success criterion and from the glossary. ASCII ART: We have changed "characters" to "characters or glyphs" Authored Unit: We have eliminated the definition of authored unit for (among others) the reasons you have cited. Text/Unicode: We have removed references to Unicode. Luminosity contrast Ratio: This has been revised to include references to the standards on which it was based as well as tie to color space specifications.; (Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)