Re: Issue 130

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 10:35 AM, Steve Faulkner
<faulkner.steve@gmail.com> wrote:
> hi benjamin,
>>The change proposal claims it is "impractical" for "a user agent
>>or an assistive technology to create their own set of heuristics for
>>determining if a table is to be used for layout".
>
> It is true that SOME assitive technology have implemented heuristics
> to detect what they think are layout tables, this sometimes does not
> work correctly (in my experience testing web sites and web
> applications) and it also sometimes falsely hides data tables.

Indeed.

Given unannotated layout tables aren't going anywhere, and given the
limited development resources at the disposal of accessibility
concerns, I think the poverty of these independently implemented
heuristics is a strong argument for optimizing and then standardizing
them, just as the poverty of reverse engineered tag soup parsing was a
strong argument for optimizing and then standardizing it. But that's
perhaps orthogonal to this change proposal.

> you state "Multiple user agents" have heauristics, which of the major
> browsers have such heusristics implemented?

At least Gecko, WebKit.

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/accessible/src/html/nsHTMLTableAccessible.cpp

https://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/WebCore/accessibility/AccessibilityTable.cpp

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Wednesday, 15 December 2010 12:03:13 UTC