Re: summary attribute compromise proposal

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> ...
>> Unless the validator develops sufficient intelligence so that it can 
>> tell a good summary value from a bad one, it should stay silent.
> 
> I think silence is not an approach that will get buy-in from people who 
> think summary is problematic.
> 
>> Any element can be mis-used and in fact is misused in practice, so why 
>> make an exception in this case?
> 
> This case may be worth an exception, because we have some evidence that 
> this particular attribute is often used wrong, and HTML5 offers new 
> alternatives. Thus, highly visible guidance to authors could help. Is 

I think there's disagreement about whether these alternative really can 
replace @summary. Furthermore, where's the AT support for them?

In my opinion, warnings make only sense if there's a way for the author 
to silence them. For instance, in Java, for deprecated methods the 
JavaDoc usually specifies an alternative. And for many other warnings, 
there are pragmas to point out "I mean it".

> your concern about the label as a "warning", or about having advisory 
> guidance in the validator at all?
> ...

Advisory guidance is fine unless it's misleading.

BR, Julian

Received on Tuesday, 4 August 2009 21:10:34 UTC