People are confused by "future link" references in techniques

[awkawk]

No description provided.

[awkawk]

How would the group feel about moving all "future link" references to a wiki page and removing them from the How To Meet document?

[michael-n-cooper]

The point of the "future link" was to indicate techniques at least by
title even if we hadn't gotten around to writing up the entire thing.
There was a sense that this would better than nothing and provide some
meaningful guidance to authors. Removing them would leave a visible hole
in some places. That said, I do understand that the meaning of "future
link" is confusing and leaving the techniques not fleshed out for years
brings question to their value. Maybe we should look at other solutions,
such as putting them in a separate section "other potential approaches",
or pruning them to ones we think are really potentially useful, or
making a real effort to flesh them out. Maybe after doing some or all of
that it would be clearer whether there's value in keeping the ideas in
the doc or moving it out to a development resource.

On 29/05/2015 2:48 PM, Andrew Kirkpatrick wrote:

How would the group feel about moving all "future link" references to
a wiki page and removing them from the How To Meet document?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#91 (comment).

[DavidMacDonald]

Yes in 6 years we've never developed one AAA future link. It might be a good idea to to a garage cleaning on them to see which are still useful and do what you say Michael retitle them "other potentially useful approaches"

[michael-n-cooper]

There are 251 references with "future link" in them.

Some of them seem to be more "best practices" than techniques. The difference is that techniques are really specific things one does to satisfy a SC; best practices are general design ideas to keep in mind to enhance accessibility and usability but aren't the sort of thing it's useful to see on a checklist or that always relate to a specific SC. A problem with this may be that best practices are not in scope of the WCAG WG.

Many "advisory techniques" sections would be completely empty if we removed the "future link" techniques.

Some do seem like techniques that would be useful as such.

Some are proposed advisory techniques because they're not sufficient in and of themselves. Others because they go above and beyond what is required to be sufficient. Yet in both cases they're useful.

I don't believe this is either editorial or ready to survey, so removing those tags.

I think the right action might be to go through all 251 of these and categorize them as:

• Move to a "best practices" page, and try to make something coherent out of that. They would not be presented as "techniques" in that case and might be consolidated. I'm not sure if best practices should be organized by SC or by some more functional approach.
• Move to a "useful but not sufficient" techniques page.
• Move to a "goes above and beyond" techniques page. There may be a candidate future guidelines requirement, which we should also track.
• Write up the technique already, it's useful.
• Remove the technique altogether, it doesn't have enough value to take one of the above actions.

When Advisory Techniques sections are left empty after taking these actions, remove them.

I can take a pass at proposing this categorization. But it will take a while to do it for 251 techniques.

[joshueoconnor]

https://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/35422/Sept1st2015/results