Re: Proposed change to checkpoint 5.3

Chuck's proposal is a positive development in that it attempts to
synthesise several of the issues. My main difficulty with it is that it
does not sufficiently develop the point which I made yesterday regarding
logical structure. It is not simply a question of whether the reading
order is reasonable when the table is presented in a linear form. Equally
fundamental is the question of whether the logical structure (paragraphs,
lists, quotations, headings, etc.) is retained when the table-related tags
are deleted. A logical reading order only amounts to limited
accessibility; knowing where the headings, list items, paragraph breaks,
etc., occur in the document is very important, for purposes of
transformation to braille and audio, for structural navigation and for
comprehension when a document is presented in a serial medium. This is a
priority 2, not a priority 3 issue. Thus I would emphasise correct
structure as well as a logical reading order, and if this could be
achieved succinctly (together with the existing requirement that only
single-column tables be used), it would be possible to permit layout
tables under these precise conditions only, and to add a note discouraging
their use.

I think that Chuck's position is very close to mine, the only remaining
point of difference being the need to emphasise the importance of using
correct structural markup within the table cells (as in the W3C home page)
so that properly structured and semantically rich markup is present, and
can be relied upon to format the document appropriately in ifferent media
when the table-related tags are deleted.

Received on Thursday, 15 April 1999 18:53:05 UTC