RE: WYSIWYG editors non-support of complex tables

Thank you. That addresses my concern.


Hope this helps,
Charles Belov
SFMTA Webmaster


From: Loretta Guarino Reid [mailto:lorettaguarino@google.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2012 6:16 PM
To: Belov, Charles
Cc: public-comments-wcag20@w3.org
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG editors non-support of complex tables

On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 1:26 PM, <noreply@w3.org<mailto:noreply@w3.org>> wrote:

Name: Charles Belov
Email: charles.belov@sfmta.com<mailto:charles.belov@sfmta.com>
Affiliation: San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency
Document: TD
Item Number: H63
Part of Item: User Agent Notes
Comment Type: technical
Summary of Issue: WYSIWYG editors non-support of complex tables
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
If HTML editors do not support the scope and header attribute without hand coding, then there needs to be advice to convert complex tables to simple tables.

For example, it is my understanding that Adobe Contribute CS4 does not support these attributes, and Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 does not support a convenient UI for applying them, necessitating hard coding.

Proposed Change:
Add paragraph:

If the HTML editor software being used does not support the scope attribute, or does not support these without hard coding and the author wishes to avoid hard coding, it will be neccessary to convert the complex table to one or more simple tables.  See technique H51: Using table markup to present tabular information
================================
Response from the Working Group
================================
User Agent Notes describe issues in support by assistive technology and browsers. WCAG does not address levels of support by authoring tools. So adding this advice to the User Agent Notes is not appropriate.

We will add another note to the technique description, suggesting that authors consider converting complex tables to one or more simple tables.

Note: Some users may find it easier to work with several simple tables than one more complex table. Authors may wish to consider whether they can convert complex tables to one or more simple tables.

Loretta Guarino Reid, WCAG WG Co-Chair
Gregg Vanderheiden, WCAG WG Co-Chair
Michael Cooper, WCAG WG Staff Contact


On behalf of the WCAG Working Group