Re: Heuristic Tests for Data Tables (Discussion)

HI James,

> James Graham wrote:
>> Ben 'Cerbera' Millard wrote:
>>> I wonder how many tables can be made natively accessible? How  
>>> many will need to be retrofitted by authors with <th> or scope=""  
>>> or headers="" and how likely is that? I guess more studying (like  
>>> Philip and I and others have done) and prototyping of  
>>> implementations (like James Graham might do)
>> There's some very early work on this available at [1] (only the  
>> HTML4 algorithms are currently implemented). Due to a bug in a  
>> html5lib serializer badness occurs when you give it a page  
>> containing more than one table. I also haven't checked that it's  
>> giving the correct results in almost any cases. However if you  
>> want to report bugs feel free.
>
> This now also has some work on the algorithm from the HTML 5 spec,  
> with similar caveats as before i.e. it is hideously under tested.
>
>> [1] http://wordsandpictures.dyndns.org/table_inspector.html
>>

that's some great news. I ran my prototypical table[1] through the  
tool to see what it would look like with either the HTML4 or HTML5  
algorithms. Keep in mind that this is a relatively complex (though  
small) table that has neither scope= nor headers=. attributes. So in  
both cases its being done strictly with the basic algorithms. I'm  
still looking it over myself, but to compare the results yourself you  
can compare the visual table itself[1] to the resulting tables  
produced by the HTMl 4.01[2] and HTML5[3] algorithms. See if the  
algorithms produce the association(s) you expect.

Take care,
Rob


[1]: <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Aug/ 
att-0484/ComplexTables.html>
[2]: <http://wordsandpictures.dyndns.org/cgi-bin/tables/ 
table_inspector.py?uri=http%3A%2F%2Flists.w3.org%2FArchives%2FPublic% 
2Fpublic-html%2F2007Aug%2Fatt-0484%2FComplexTables.html&algorithm=html4
On Aug 24, 2007, at 4:49 PM, James Graham wrote:>
[3]: <http://wordsandpictures.dyndns.org/cgi-bin/tables/ 
table_inspector.py?uri=http%3A%2F%2Flists.w3.org%2FArchives%2FPublic% 
2Fpublic-html%2F2007Aug%2Fatt-0484%2FComplexTables.html&algorithm=html5>