The test doesn't require association between header and data cells

Name: Wilco Fiers
Email: w.fiers@accessibility.nl
Affiliation: Accessibility Founcation
Document: TD
Item Number: H51
Part of Item: Tests
Comment Type: technical
Summary of Issue: The test doesn't require association between header and data cells
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
This test only requires for a table to have tr, td and th elements. But what it should do is require data cells to be associated with their corresponding header cells using td and th elements. Requiring every table to have a th is incorrect in my opinion, since tables can exist that do not have headers. This is not always obvious to people, but it’s quite simple to create a table without headers. Simply take a table and remove the rows and columns with headings in it leaves you with a perfectly valid and accessible (though probably not very useable) table that only has data cells.
 
This comment is part of the project for the Accessibility Support Database

Proposed Change:
* Check for the presence of tabular information.
* For each occurrence of tabular information: 
** Check that data cells are marked up with td elements
** Check that header cells are marked up with th elements
** Check that data cells are associated with their corresponding header cell(s) according to the rules described in the HTML specification.

Received on Tuesday, 11 February 2014 10:06:46 UTC