Re: Stephen Ferg's Table Research

On Mon, 13 Aug 2007, Ben 'Cerbera' Millard wrote:
>
> I've been having off-list discussions with Simon 'zcorpan' Pieters about 
> header association in tables. "Nested row headers" [4][5][6] seem 
> difficult to do in HTML with scope="" unless one re-arranges the cells 
> to use rowspan="" or applies the headers+id technique. As such, I think 
> Ian's conclusion may need revisiting for this case.

I intend to study the issue of how to link header cells and data cells in 
detail when I get to the relevant wiki page once I start going through the 
issues in the wiki. So yes, I agree, this will definitely be revisited. 

(There are many issues here beyond just whether any particular table can 
be expressed in markup. Some of the tables I've seen discussed in these 
threads are so complex that I don't understand what they are supposed to 
represent, and I'm not blind -- we probably don't want to encourage 
authors to write that kind of table in the first place! We have to balance 
the usability of the language and the ease of implementation with its 
expressiveness. Our goal isn't to make anything expressible in HTML, our 
goal is to hit the 80% mark that helps most authors while keeping the 
language simple and approachable, and while making it really easy to Do 
The Right Thing to make pages that are accessible to everyone. We want to 
design features that are inherently accessible, not features that require 
an explicit step to "add accessibility", since most authors won't do that, 
leaving that kind of feature pretty much dead in the water.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 14 August 2007 05:24:14 UTC