- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 10:27:15 +0300
- To: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
Like Mark Pilgrim, I tried to find a record of how the summary attribute became part of HTML 4.0 but found nothing. (http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20090804#l-190 ) The attribute first showed up in public in: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970917/struct/tables.html#h-12.1.1 It says: 'Note. A new attribute for the table summary is needed because the caption for visual users is generally insufficient. The title attribute is inappropriate because browsers render this as a "tool tip" which is limited to a single line of text. In some user agents, long lines are clipped.' If title attribute clipping is the whole reason why the summary attribute exists, it seems like an awfully weak reason. It's like all the requests for new CSS features because browser X implements an existing CSS feature badly. Does anyone who was there at the time remember what happened? Summary wasn't in the previous draft from July 1997: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40-970708/struct/tables.html#h-7.5.1.1 People with Member access may be interested in inspecting http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Group/9708/WD-html40-970808/struct/tables.html and http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Group/9708/issues.html also. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Friday, 7 August 2009 07:28:01 UTC