[Bug 5822] The headers attribute should be able to reference a td

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=5822


Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
         AssignedTo|dave.null@w3.org            |mike@w3.org
             Status|REOPENED                    |NEW




--- Comment #14 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>  2008-07-04 05:33:37 ---
I don't know what to tell you don't think the earlier comments are reasonable
or if you don't think I've considered this properly. IMHO the table you
provided can be quite adequately represented with the current markup, and while
it is certainly the case that not _all_ tables can, certainly more than 80%
can, and that's all we generally aim for with any feature in HTML5, in the
interests of keeping things manageable and simple.

Historically headers="" has been terribly badly used by authors. This leads to
worse accessibility than no headers="" attributes at all. If the goal is to
improve accessibility overall, rather than increase the maximum possible level
of achievable accessibility, then we _must_ consider the impact of making the
feature more powerful (and complex). In any case it isn't at all clear to me
that it is possible to have good hierarchical UI for table headers, and it
isn't clear to me that headers-of-headers are a good design.

Furthermore, given that the current HTML5 algorithms allow one to accessibly
mark up the sample data you provided without _any_ explicit accessibility
attributes, it seems to be that we have made significant strides in the
accessibility of tables in HTML already. Before we build on this, we should
gain implementation experience and perform detailed studies of how people use
the new markup, so that we know what we need to do to make things better. For
example it may be that a new type of table cell which automatically acts as
both a header and a data cell without any explicit accessibility attributes or
without any explicit associations would be better than headers or scope.

Reassigning to Mike for arbitration.


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Received on Friday, 4 July 2008 05:34:12 UTC