Re: some thoughts on objections to publishing ""HTML 5 differences from HTML 4"

Forgive my ignorance, but can you point me to some information about
the "the 80% case" and how this was derived.



On 29/06/07, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Jun 2007, Steven Faulkner wrote:
> >
> > The rationale for dropping the headers,longdesc and summary attributes
> > was presumably formulated by the WHAT WG when the decisions to drop
> > these attributes was made.
>
> No such decision was ever made. We started with a blank slate, and added
> features based on use cases. The use case "I'm blind and I need to be able
> to tell which headers apply to a data cell somehow" was originally handled
> by just having <th> elements, scope="", and implicit scoping with an
> algorithm, since that seemed to handle the 80% case. It has, since then,
> been suggested that it might not cover enough cases, but that thorough
> research hasn't yet been applied to the specification. None of the use
> cases considered so far resulted in the adoption of longdesc="" and
> summary="", and so far there is no thorough research transcribed to the
> wiki containing use cases suggesting that longdesc="" is useful.
>
> (The wiki pages for summary="" and headers="" could be improved by
> decoupling the proposals for those attributes from the explanations of the
> problems that the spec doesn't cover, by the way. It's nice to see those
> wiki pages exist, though.)
>
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>


-- 
with regards

Steve Faulkner
Technical Director - TPG Europe
Director - Web Accessibility Tools Consortium

www.paciellogroup.com | www.wat-c.org

Received on Friday, 29 June 2007 22:46:52 UTC