Re: User agent support of SUMMARY attribute in tables

My personal opinion is that this is too literal an interpretation of 
the example as expressing the one true way of doing things, a feeling 
that I believe is reflected in the discussions of the WCAG group on how 
to be clearer about what is normative and what is informative in the 
specifications. You could clarify this by asking, but I would consider 
it high time to do so - the caption element ought to be a clear 
alternative, for example.

my 2 cents worth

Chaals

On Monday, Jan 27, 2003, at 12:19 Australia/Melbourne, Michael Cooper 
wrote:

>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: David Poehlman [mailto:poehlman1@comcast.net]
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 8:49 AM
>>
>> perhaps we can persuade the folks on bobby development to add
>> some table
>> analesis that does not require that the summary attrib be
>> present in an lay
>> out table.
>
> As some posts to this thread have mentioned, the WCAG appears to state 
> that
> all tables in HTML, whether used for data or layout, should have the 
> summary
> attribute. We have attempted to align Bobby to the guidelines as much 
> as
> possible, and careful consideration of the guidelines led us to 
> incorporate
> this interpretation into Bobby's evaluations. It has not been clear to 
> us
> whether conformance to that interpretation leads to the most useful 
> result,
> and from this discussion it is obviously quite difficult to decide 
> this. But
> conforming Bobby to the guidelines, to the best of our understanding, 
> is the
> best way to keep Bobby "honest".
>
> Sometimes alternate interpretations or new information have been 
> brought to
> us and we have changed the support for Bobby, leading to some important
> improvements. In the case of the summary attribute for tables this is a
> thorny enough issue that I don't feel we can yet act on it. But the
> information and ideas that have been raised in this discussion are very
> useful to the process of evaluation development.
>
--
Charles McCathieNevile           charles@sidar.org
Fundación SIDAR                       http://www.sidar.org

Received on Monday, 27 January 2003 02:18:20 UTC