Re: PF Response: @Summary

Joshue O Connor wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, Ian Hickson wrote:
>>> Is the need not served by <caption>?
> 
>> No. A caption is provided visually. [...]
> 
> It is also worth noting that <caption> is a terse descriptor. @summary
> is a long descriptor.

Since this is clearly going to be a long discussion it might help (and 
would certainly help me) if we start from clear premises. So it would be 
great if statements like "<caption> is..." could be clear about whether 
they are referring to spec requirements, actual author practice, some 
sort of best practice (that may or may not match actual common 
practice), or something else, along with pointer to the relevant 
documentation/evidence.

In this case I can't see anything in a HTML spec to back up your claim 
that <caption> must be terse whilst @summary must be long. In general it 
seems problematic to require that caption be terse because certain types 
of documents inherently have long table captions; scientific papers 
often put a paragraph or more of text in the table caption explaining 
how to read the table, for example.

Received on Thursday, 4 June 2009 11:12:41 UTC