Re: summarization information delivery options: attribute or element

On Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:48:26 +0100, Gez Lemon <g.lemon@webprofession.com>
wrote:
...
> I don't believe that summary should be an element, as it's supposed to
> be concise overview of the structure for people who are unable to
> determine the structure visually.

Agreed. And the simple way to do that is with an attribute. There used to
be one for adding a summary of a table.

I don't think it is so important whether you think it is a long
description of a table or a concise summary. Some authors are better than
others, and will do a better job of communicating. Some spec writers and
educators are better than others and will do a better job of communicating
what the spec is trying to achieve. But I think it will take a fair bit of
effort to get a consensus around the goal, and I suspect that effort is
better spent on making and describing and improving real-world examples
than on trying to get the wording of the spec itself to be perfect - if it
is more or less good enough, we can focus on the real world.

> If the reason for making it an
> element is that authors can provide richer markup, then I think we're
> definitely outside the territory of a concise overview of the
> structure of a data table, and more into summary being a long
> description of the table.

Or many other things.

...

> It should just be provided with markup
> so that everyone has access to it, and referenced with
> aria-describedby.

Yes, for the cases Gregory posits that require being element content,
using aria-describedBy to point to that content (which might be in the
caption element content, or might be somewhere else) seems like the
logical approach.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
       je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Tuesday, 2 March 2010 19:41:56 UTC