RE: Taking another round at @summary

John Foliot, Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:50:00 -0800 (PST):
> Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>> 
>> It is a general problem with the current
>> draft that the only thing that is specifically dedicated to explain the
>> table structure, is an obsoleted attribute - @summary.
> 
> Point of clarification Leif, @summary was removed from the list of
> obsolete attributes (http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#obsolete),
> although the draft still treats it as a second-class citizen by suggesting
> that it needs to generate a warning whenever used, even if/when it might
> be used appropriately and correctly.

OK, so I was wrong in perceiving it as if Jonas was suggesting to 
obsolete it again, in favour of ARIA, I suppose. Thanks for keeping the 
debate on track! 

The real issue then is whether the advice (the warning in the 
validator) to use another feature rather than @summary increases 
accessibility.  In the evaluation of that question, we are then faced 
with the fact that WCAG 2.0 requires that table summaries can be 
programmatically determined, and that @summary so far still is the only 
HTML 5 feature which can be programmatically determined as a table 
summary.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Thursday, 7 January 2010 00:56:29 UTC