- From: Smylers <Smylers@stripey.com>
- Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:10:05 +0100
- To: HTMLWG WG <public-html@w3.org>
Shelley Powers writes: > Though CSSquirrel addressed this issue humorously, several of us have > expressed concern about decisions being made on proprietary data, There was data shared with the list which suggested very strongly that nearly all uses of summary are so misguided as to be useless -- so fortunately in this case[*1] we don't need to take on trust analysis of private data. (Those who have seen private data are not making any claims from it which can't also be seen in the public data.) > This is then used as some kind of empirical proof that the @summary > attribute should be pulled. As somebody with no previous view on the matter, and who is open to being persuaded one way or t'other, I initially found that to be compelling evidence that summary is so misused that it's useless, because nobody would ever find the few good values among the cornucopia of irrelevance. However another data point was added: screen readers will ignore most of those summaries, having heuristically determined their host tables to be layout rather than data tables. So those errant summary values are mostly benign, and of summaries actually read to users a large enough proportion may be helpful to make it worth the feature's existence -- it completely changes the balance on summary's utility. So what it would be really useful to see now is the algorithm screen readers use for determining whether a table is for layout or data, for a couple of reasons: * It would enable determining which of the summary values Philip listed are heard by screen reader users and which are ignored. This lets us see how good the technique is at skipping the irrelevancies, and enables examination of just the summary values which users hear. * If summary is part of HTML 5 then it will depend on user agents applying that algorithm, so it needs to be specified. In particular, a new talking browser entering the market would need to implement the algorithm to be interopable with the current web. Are any developers of software which already includes such an algorithm on this list, and if so are they willing to share it? If not then it seems we'll have to reverse engineer it to get summary in HTML 5. Is anybody in a position to help with that? Cheers. Smylers [*1] Your general point is of course a good one. There may be places in HTML 5 where justification of a decision involves non-public data, in which case we do need to work out what to do there. But the debate about summary -- which seems complicated enough as it is -- can be separated from that.
Received on Wednesday, 24 June 2009 11:16:11 UTC