RE: OPTGROUP: 12.3.1

Hi - thanks for the follow-up. Your example helped me to see what was going
on. The LABEL attribute of OPTGROUP is required, which is what I hadn't seen
before. When I removed that from your example, I could replicate the problem
I experienced. I'll make the appropriate changes on our web site - in a week
or less I hope it will be up at www.cast.org. It is great to see an OPTGROUP
actually implemented.

Since IE5/Mac supports HTML 4 completely, could you describe to me how it
supports the LONGDESC attribute? It wasn't obvious to me - I was thinking it
might appear as an option in the context menu for the image ("View
description" that would pop up a small window, more than a tooltip but less
than a full browser window). I'd love to see a graphical browser that
supports that, I think the LONGDESC attribute could provide major benefits
to users who can see images but need a supplementary description (beyond ALT
text) to understand it. This comes of course from my perspective working in
an educational organization.

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: Tantek Celik [mailto:tantek@cs.stanford.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, October 24, 2000 11:29 AM
To: w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org
Cc: chris@w3.org
Subject: Re: OPTGROUP: 12.3.1


This message was pointed out to me by Ian Jacobs and Chris Lilley.

I am not on this mailing list, so please reply-all.

> From: "Michael Cooper" <mcooper@cast.org>
> To: <w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org>
> Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 17:44:23 -0400
> Message-ID: <NCBBJOMIELMIDGCAPFCIMEIMDIAA.mcooper@cast.org>
> Subject: OPTGROUP: 12.3.1
>
> Note from the field: we implemented Technique 12.3.1 in Bobby, and used
that
> on our beta new web site. We implemented OPTGROUPs in SELECT elements per
> the requirement. Guess what happened? In Internet Explorer 5 (and maybe
> earlier, haven't tested) for Mac, drop-down lists had no options show up.

AFAIK IE5/Mac is the only shipping browser that _does_ support OPTGROUP per
the spec.  Here is a page (using examples from the HTML4 spec) which
demonstrates this.

http://www.tantek.com/HTML4/OPTGROUP.html

It is true that previous versions (4.5, 4.0, 3.0 etc.) of IE/Mac did not
support OPTGROUP.

If you have a valid HTML page that uses OPTGROUP which has problems in
IE5/Mac, please forward me the URL so that I may see if I can do something
about it.

> It's highly distressing that a browser (and a new one at that) has
> destructive incompatibility with the HTML standard.

I'm sorry to hear that that was your experience, as we believe we have fully
implemented HTML4 - first to do so.  If you could forward any other
problematic URLs of valid HTML4, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

Tantek

...........................................................................
Tantek Gelik                                          tantekc@microsoft.com
W3C CSS&FP wg rep, HTML wg alternate                 tantek@cs.stanford.edu
Tasman Dev Lead / Internet Explorer for Macintosh     Microsoft Corporation

Received on Wednesday, 25 October 2000 11:24:19 UTC