Re: Deliverable for Action 72 @headers

2008/8/21 James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>:
> Laura Carlson wrote:
>>
>> The headers/id markup is functional and works today. Results of some
>> recent testing:
>> http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/TableHeadersTestingBug5822
>
> It seems to me that this testcase is wrong in that the contents of columns 1
> and 8, and of row 2, should be marked as headers not as data cells. This
> change would appear to be needed for the table to be consistent with the
> current spec, which says that <th> represents a header cell; the expected
> results of your test clearly depend on these cells being treated as header
> cells by UAs.

According to the HTML5 editor, hierarchical headers aren't allowed in
the current spec [1]. I support your editor's position, but maybe you
need to regroup to determine whether or not hierarchical headers are a
lesser loss than allowing a header attribute to reference a td as well
as a th element. Allowing a header attribute to reference a td a well
as a th would be the simplest solution, and works well with current
implementations, but I'm not yet clear on why that has been deemed
unreasonable, as no explanation has been provided.

> It is possible that with this change the table would still not be processed
> in the way that you would like e.g. "Running Cost" would not be a header for
> "12/12/2005". This could be fixed in the association algorithm e.g. by
> saying that scope="col" made the header apply to all cells rather than just
> data cells.

Allowing the scope attribute on a header cell to include other header
cells would fix the association, but that is at odds with your
editor's opinion that hierarchical headers are not allowed in HTML5.
Is your editor correct, or are hierarchical headers allowed in HTML5?

> We would need to re-examine the reason for the current behavior
> being chosen to see if this case was an oversight or if there is a good
> reason the current spec.

I completely agree you need to re-examine the reason for the current
behaviour, as it clearly hasn't been thought out properly - you don't
even appear to have reached consensus amongst yourselves.

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


Gez


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Received on Friday, 22 August 2008 00:15:49 UTC