Re: ACTION-128: Draft @summary voting text in conjunction with PF

On Jul 8, 2009, at 1:58 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Wed, 8 Jul 2009, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>
>> Right now, the end of the section about how to provide explanatory
>> information about tables currently says this:
>>
>> "If a table element has a summary attribute, the user agent may  
>> report
>> the contents of that attribute to the user."
>>
>> I would suggest that the text from the obsolete features section  
>> could
>> go here, to provide clearer guidance: [...]
>>
>> I think something like this would provide better guidance to authors.
>
> The section you quote is in the implementation-only part of the spec  
> (i.e.
> it is hidden when you switch to the author view). Does that affect  
> your
> suggestion?

Yes. I think that makes it more important to give guidance to authors.  
If a feature is conforming but SHOULD NOT be used, then it seems  
important to directly give authors an explanation of what it does and  
why it should not be used. This will also help conformance checkers  
give authors the right advice.

For many of the other obsolete features, the basic position is that  
they should not be used in new documents, but it may not be worth  
expending effort to purge them from old documents. So just labeling  
them obsolete gives enough guidance to authors and conformance  
checkers. But summary="" is not quite like that.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Wednesday, 8 July 2009 22:35:48 UTC