- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 10:49:19 +0300
- To: John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu>
- Cc: "'Jonas Sicking'" <jonas@sicking.cc>, "'David Singer'" <singer@apple.com>, <public-html@w3.org>
On Jun 6, 2009, at 02:58, John Foliot wrote: > If you cannot grok the difference between the two, is it a failure > of the attributes/elements or > a failure of developer comprehension? It's a failure of both. You can attribute the failure of the feature to the failure of developers to comprehend, but the feature still failed. > At what point must we stop holding > the hands of professionals and demand that they understand what it > is they > are dealing with and working with? It's not about demanding understanding but about whether people-- professionals and amateurs--actually do understand in practice. > <table summary="Rows contain destinations, traveling dates, and grand > total. Columns contain expense category and total. The first column > contains merged table cells."> > <!-- Remainder of table --> [...] > The specific functionality it > seeks to address it delivers in spades: as the PF WG noted, "Summary > serves a need, and serves it well. It is familiar to users. It is > supported in browsers. It is properly utilized on many web sites which > strive to be accessible." What's the "serves it well" conclusion based on? The evidence at http://philip.html5.org/data/table-summary-values-dotbot.html doesn't appear to support the conclusion at all. From the evidence, it seems that: 1) @summary mostly contains bogus data 2) when it does contain non-bogus data, the data it contains is short and caption-like and not of the kind shown in the example I quoted from your email above. > (and again: "The wider web is not an example of good practice.") Is there a less wide web where @summary actually serves it's purpose well? > Herein lies the other half of the problem - nothing has been > adequately > proposed that replaces the specific functionality that @summary > currently > delivers. If @summary is indeed a net waste in practice, removing it even without a replacement would be a net win. Reasoning from evidence gleaned from existing content (http://philip.html5.org/data/table-summary-values-dotbot.html ) should overwhelmingly support the notion that @summary is a net harm to Web accessibility. It seems to me that this conclusion can't be countered with any amount of reasoning without further evidence, and the only convincing counter-evidence would be evidence of the constituency of @summary in practice opting to read it nonetheless, which would show that value of the occasional non-bogus summary outweighs on average all the bogus summaries. (If @summary were a prospective feature, mere reasoning could be convincing. However, @summary should be considered retrospectively given that it has existed already for years and we can use evidence of its actual track record instead of mere prospective reasoning.) -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen@iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Monday, 8 June 2009 07:49:58 UTC