- From: Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no>
- Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:22:30 +0100
- To: Laura Carlson <laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com>
- Cc: Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie>, Cynthia Shelly <cyns@microsoft.com>, HTML Accessibility Task Force <public-html-a11y@w3.org>
Laura Carlson, Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:42:32 -0600: > Hi Josh > > You wrote: > >> Is this kind of 'sorting' mechanism necessary at all? And if so should >> it be separate disambiguated from @summary. If a sorting mechanism is >> needed I think this would be best. A sorting mechanism could be useful >> for dynamically generated tables I guess. > > Excelent question, Josh. > > If in fact a sorting mechanism is needed, a separate change proposal > for it would seem to be in order. It is unclear to me what you and Josh are saying. Doesn't @orientation also need a separate change proposal then? And aria-sort is part of ARIA, so it would take a change proposal to *not* get aria-sort. Ian said that information about sort order should be linked to something that actually changes the sort order. I agree that something like that probably needs a separate change proposal. However, no one has actually proposed such a feature. The definesorder="" attribute that I suggested is also only about information. (However, it gives slightly less information than aria-sort, and thus would be less likely to get out of touch with the data of the table.) A compelling usecase for @summary was that it could be used to inform specifically about the sort order or sort column. Obviously, such info could be relevant to get in your preferred localization. And since @summary will inherit the language of the <table> element, it seems wider accessible to use e.g. @definesorder for that, so that the user agent can inform you about it in your own language. @summary could still have a role to play w.r.t. to giving information about the sorting and/or the defining column/row. For example, even aria-sort is very unspecific about the kind of sorting. May be a good thing to have in the spec about @summary is that authors should try to create it in a "programmatic" way. Don't be "creative", but use it to present short facts about the table, derived from the table itself. -- leif halvard silli
Received on Thursday, 10 December 2009 13:23:10 UTC