Re: summary attribute compromise proposal

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
> On Aug 4, 2009, at 1:36 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> 
>> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>> On Aug 4, 2009, at 1:29 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> ...
>>>>>> I agree it's good to make sure @summary is used for what it's 
>>>>>> there; I'm not yet convinced that an unconditional validator 
>>>>>> warning is the right way to get there, though.
>>>>> Do you think it's acceptable as part of a compromise, even if 
>>>>> you're not sure it's ideal?
>>>>> ...
>>>>
>>>> No, not really, as the behavior of validators really is a key 
>>>> question here (next to the (current) guidance not to use it).
>>> What do you think is the proper validator behavior on encountering 
>>> summary="" - keeping in mind that providing no guidance at all to 
>>> authors is likely to be unacceptable to many people?
>>
>> If by summary="" you mean an *empty* attribute, then yes, I think that 
>> should generate a warning. Another case for a warning might be summary 
>> text that is repeated in the table caption.
> 
> 
> No, I mean a summary attribute being present at all, regardless of its 
> value. What do you think should be the validator behavior for that case?
> ...

Unless the validator develops sufficient intelligence so that it can 
tell a good summary value from a bad one, it should stay silent.

Any element can be mis-used and in fact is misused in practice, so why 
make an exception in this case?

BR, Julian