- From: Laura Carlson <laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2007 13:12:36 -0500
- To: public-html@w3.org
fyi... > A week ago I > received an email from Ben 'Cerbera' Millard saying that WHATWG was > considering removing the headers="" attribute for HTML 5 and asking > "Do you find irregular table to be so rare they are safely ignored?" > > My answer was "No!" And I pointed to a couple of complex tables. > Ben's response was that those tables could be handled with scope, > colgroup and rowgroup and he referenced the marked up versions. Ben > also pointed to an algorithm to associate headings with data cells > for such complex tables > [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section- > tabular.html#header-and-data-cell-semantics ]. > > Although headers/id markup is relatively complicated it can be > explained with a couple of examples. The algorithm that Ben > referenced is incredibly obscure. I can't imagine trying to explain > that or including it in our Accessibility training! And perhaps most > importantly, in order to apply the scope/group technique, the table > must be restructured. You can't just add markup to an existing table > as you can with headers/id. More often than not, the people adding > the accessible markup are not the ones who created the table. > > Those people are probably US Federal employees (probably also > non-technical) because Federal agencies are required by Section 508 > to have accessible web content. When 508 became effective, screen > readers (for crying out loud they are NOT "speech readers"!) did not > support headers/id. Now they do. Screen Readers do not support scope > very well and the rowgroup, colgroup elements, not at all. Before > they decide to eliminate headers="" I hope they contact Section 508 > Coordinators of US Federal agencies - they are the ones who know > about complex tables and I suspect they will be very upset if > headers="" is removed. > > Posted by Jim Thatcher on Saturday, 2nd June 2007 at 23:25:36 http://juicystudio.com/article/html-scope-headers-debate.php#comment18 ---- Laura http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdesign/
Received on Wednesday, 6 June 2007 18:12:43 UTC