- From: WebConforme <dboudreau@webconforme.com>
- Date: Fri, 04 May 2007 10:21:09 -0400
- To: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
Morning, On 2-May-07, at 04:27 AM, Anne van Kesteren wrote: > Indeed. At least summary= is often abused by authors: "Table used > for layout", "Grid of 3 by 2 cells", etc. The fact that an attribute like summary can be abused by authors can hardly be a reason to take it out of the spec. The main problem with summary is that it's either: a) not used, because most people don't know of its existence (which can hardly constitute a problem, as far as this discussion goes, but would be a definitive problem if left out of a complex data table); b) misused because people who discover its existence use it in the wrong context (for example, to describe content in a presentation based table layout). When the summary attribute is correctly used, it will help an AT user make a mental image of the table itself. That will help him get a better understanding of the table, its contents and how they are structured. It is not intended to tell anything about the content itself, but to announce roughly how it is organized. For people without any visual limitations, agreed, sumaries can seem irrelevant. But for other users with different degrees of visual impairments, that attribute can often be the difference between "seeing" or "not seeing" the table as a whole. Agreed again, using values like "Table used for layout", "Grid of 3 by 2 cells", etc. to a summary attribute is not only irrelevant, it's plain useless (not to mention bothersome when read out loud. But again, this is no reason to take it our of the spec. If anything it's a reason - and a damn good one -to educate authors into using it properly. -- Denis Boudreau, Directeur WebConforme / AccessibilitéWeb 1751 rue Richardson, bureau 3.501 Montréal (Qc), Canada H3K 1G6 Téléphone : +1 514-448-2650 Télécopieur : +1 514.667.2216 dboudreau@webconforme.com blackberry@webconforme.com http://www.webconforme.com/ ======// À méditer //======= Les choses changent plus lentement que l’on pense. La rapidité des changements technologiques est tempérée par la lenteur de leur acceptation sociale. (Michel Cartier)
Received on Friday, 4 May 2007 14:21:17 UTC