- From: <jgraham@opera.com>
- Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:38:19 +0000
- To: Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com>
- Cc: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, "public-html@w3.org WG" <public-html@w3.org>
Quoting Shelley Powers <shelley.just@gmail.com>: > What do you think of the summary element, as long term solution, that > Laura has pointed out to several folks? Other than she didn't use > bullets? As a child of <table> <summary> (or any other element) has too bad legacy compatibility properties to work. As a child of <caption> or used with <figure><legend> <summary> seems rather similar to <caption><details> except: It is somewhat less clear to me how it would work. What would a graphical UA display when the summary is not open, for example? It duplicates, almost exactly, an existing piece of functionality in the language draft (i.e. <details>). I think there are strong advantages to having as few ways as possible to achieve the same thing; it is easier for authors because they have to learn fewer things to understand HTML, it is easier for implementers because they don't have to implement multiple similar things. The combination of these two factors is a net win for users because it is less likely that a situation arises where authors A and B use solution 1 that works in browser X whilst author C uses solution 2 that works in browsers X and Z and authors D, E, F and G do nothing because they can't find a cross-browser solution. The name is good for people with experience of writing HTML 4 documents using @summary but seems confusing to everyone else; the english word "summary" is the opposite of "extended description" yet that is its supposed usecase. It seems more reasonable to use <summary> in place of <legend> in <details> (everywhere, no just in table captions) so that the meaning of the element matches its english meaning. It has fewer legacy parsing problems than things like <details> that, as drafted, depend on the <legend> element. The last issue for <details> could be solved by using <summary> to mean "short summary" and changing <details> to have the content model "one summary element, followed by flow content". This would give <summary> the opposite meaning to the one currently proposed but given the evidence that authors have mostly failed to understand how @summary is supposed to be used, it may be a change for the better.
Received on Wednesday, 10 June 2009 08:39:06 UTC