- From: Thomas Broyer <t.broyer@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2007 23:06:04 +0200
- To: public-html@w3.org, "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch>
2007/6/5, Laura Carlson: > > Comment by Joe Clark > > > Anyway, the definitive analysis of complex HTML tables is still Steve > > Ferg's: > > http://www.ferg.org/section508/accessible_tables_recommendations.html Wow! That's REALLY worth reading! ...so is the "main paper" at <http://www.ferg.org/section508/accessible_tables.html> What I learnt: - scope= is even less useful than I thought (I didn't ever read the 11.4.3 section of HTML4, don't ask me why, I didn't ever know it existed!) - the algorithm in HTML5 for associating header cells and data cells is far less powerful than the "basic" one from HTML4 (it starts from headers and searches data cells to associate with, while the HTML4 algorithm takes the other way: from data cells to header cells, which is generally what people need, I guess) - I wasn't misunderstanding the headers= attribute (though I learnt some things about it from the "basic algorithm" of section 11.4.3). Headers= is the only way to "work around" a limitation of the table model: colgroups and rowgroups cannot be nested more than two levels: colgroup and col, rowgroup and row [1]. The example in the "recommandations" paper is a good example of something that cannot be accomplished without the headers= attribute. It seems that HTML4 was very good at defining the table model (thought not at describing it in the spec), even if not widely implemented (to be proved, though). [1] http://www.ferg.org/section508/accessible_tables.html#table_of_contents_6.2.3 -- Thomas Broyer
Received on Tuesday, 5 June 2007 21:06:08 UTC