Re: Breaking Dependencies - @summary (FW: Call for Review: German WCAG 2.0 Candidate Authorized Translation)

On Tuesday 2009-08-04 10:16 -0700, John Foliot wrote:
> David, to be perfectly clear these are my opinions only, and I do not
> speak for WAI explicitly - any more than you would speak on behalf of
> Mozilla. We know and understand the 'party line' but we do not define it.
> OK?

Yes.

> L. David Baron wrote:
> > 
> > I'd like to further understand the definition of contradict here:
> > 
> >   (1) Does HTML5 contradict WCAG if it removes a feature whose use
> >   is recommended or required by WCAG?  (I'm pretty sure the answer
> >   to this one is yes.)
> 
> Yes, and this is the partial case with @summary today.

...

> >   (2) Does HTML5 contradict WCAG if it improves a feature whose use
> >   is recommended or required by WCAG, and the improvement makes what
> >   is required / recommended by WCAG no longer conforming?
> 
> Can you provide an illustration/example here?  I cannot see how making
> something better would at the same time make it non-conforming.
> (Improving the taste of Diet Pepsi does not make it any less "diet" does
> it?)

So my example here is actually summary.  Suppose we define "feature"
a little more broadly, so that instead of saying the feature is "the
summary attribute on the table element" we say the feature is "use
appropriate HTML markup to provide an overview of the structure of
data tables".

Ian's claim is that HTML5 offers *better* mechanisms for summarizing
tables than the summary attribute.  In other words, my understanding
of what Ian says is that he claims summary falls into this second
category.

The best way to convince me that it instead falls in the first
category is to explain why Ian's mechanisms [1] are not an
improvement, preferably by showing examples where @summary works
better than Ian's replacement for it.

-David

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

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Tuesday, 4 August 2009 17:45:23 UTC