Re: Summary of Thursday's IRC conversation about @summary

Philip Taylor wrote:
> Edward O'Connor wrote:
>> Hi Shelley,
>>
>>> Philip uses the dmoz directory for testing, but again, this site is not
>>> representative of the web, as a whole, as the entries in dmoz tend 
>>> to be
>>> self-selecting, and therefore not an especially good test subject. 
>>> Not if
>>> we're really looking at "web scale"--a term that was referred to 
>>> several
>>> times in the IRC discussion.
>>
>> You might consider the data made available by [1] if you're looking
>> for something at web scale.
>>
>> 1. http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/
>
> As it happens, I'm using that data now. 
> http://philip.html5.org/data/table-summary-values-dotbot.html shows 
> the <table summary> values from their set of pages. 
> (http://philip.html5.org/data/table-summary-values.html has the older 
> data from dmoz.org.)
>
You see now, that to me is valuable information to give the 
accessibility folks, if they don't have it already. This type of 
information is useful for seeing if there's any trends in types of sites 
using @summary, and where additional education is needed.

Promoting something new on the web, that isn't going to be useful for 
SEO or for selling ads, is typically an iterative process: educate, 
promote, observe, re-educate, promote, observe, etc.

I know folks will be interested in this stuff. Thanks Philip.

I don't consider it any form of "proof" that @summary is actually 
harmful, but it is interesting.

Thanks again.

Shelley

Received on Friday, 5 June 2009 18:19:39 UTC