Re: Summary of Thursday's IRC conversation about @summary

On Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:49:19 +0200, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:

>> 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.

I looked through the list, and found just *one* that is somewhat of that  
kind (and is not a layout table), which is:

"A table with two columns listing title, author, date, source, subject  
headings and comments for selected newspaper articles"
http://www.santacruzpl.org/history/clippingfile/cliplist.php?page=3&subjhead2=621&newspaper=&datelimit=

Although the table seems simple enough to not actually need the summary.  
The table can even be linearized without information loss.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Thursday, 25 June 2009 01:06:07 UTC