act-rules
Can emails be "web pages (HTML)"?
We have a definition of web pages (HTML) stating:
An HTML web page is the set of all fully active documents which share the same top-level browsing context.
I do feel this would include emails written as HTML, where the content is a document.
The problem? the specs have this wonderful note:
The title element is a required child in most situations, but when a higher-level protocol provides title information, e.g., in the subject line of an email when HTML is used as an email authoring format, the title element can be omitted.
and I would agree that a document inside an email has its title provided by the message's subject and thus does not require a title element to satisfy 2.4.2… But the current rule would fail it…
Fortunately, that should be fairly easy to fix. The language rules have an assumption in the line of "lang is used, not a content-language HTTP header". We can similarly add an assumption to the title rules in the line of "title is used, not email subject".
Interesting topic and I agree with above.
At the same time, and I know it is not an author responsibility, but the recipient can forward the email to someone else changing the subject for some reason; and thus the title might not reflect the HTML email content.
The
At the same time, and I know it is not an author responsibility, but the recipient can forward the email to someone else changing the subject for some reason; and thus the title might not reflect the HTML email content.
Absolutely. Or the original author might use a non-descriptive subject and the email still fails 2.4.2.
But ACT rules need to maintain the fail-on-fail relationship, and an HTML email without <title> element does not necessarily fails 2.4.2, so we need to take care of that.