Re: My final attempt on explanation (was RE: [DRAFT] Heartbeat poll - update 2)

On Mon, 3 Aug 2009, L. David Baron wrote:
> On Monday 2009-08-03 19:50 -0700, L. David Baron wrote:
> > Well, if you can point me to where the argument for keeping @summary 
> > was actually made, I could respond to it, but I haven't actually seen 
> > it.  And that's the problem.
> 
> I retract the claim that it hasn't been made; I think these messages
> make a decent argument for it:
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jun/0179.html
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jun/0185.html

The argument here is that summary="" is needed because it isn't shown to 
visual-UA users. This has been countered by showing that summaries that 
are useful to non-visual UAs are in fact also useful to users of visual 
UAs, and that in addition, having summaries not visible to visual UAs is 
causing authors to fail to write good summaries.

There have been several proposals that would both hide summaries by 
default from users and make them available to all users, e.g. using 
<details> inside <caption> elements, as well as a number of other 
arguments made in favour of not encouraging summary="" over alternative 
solutions to the problem, as discussed here:

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jul/0148.html

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

Received on Tuesday, 4 August 2009 04:17:59 UTC