Re: what is dt?

Hi all,

What about using a <summary> as a generalized element with <details>
etc. Leif mentioned  this previously.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2009Jun/0045.html

On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> In our internal debates at the HTML4all.org initiative, ideas
> about a generalized <summary> element was put forward. By
> generalized, it was meant that it could play the summarizing role
> both for <table>, <figure> and (perhaps) for <canvas>.
>
> The very idea about a <summary> element *only* for <table> has
> already been presented for Ian, but the idea was put aside due to
> serious DOM compatibility problems with current Web browsers. As a
> response, I proposed to have the <summary> element /inside/
> caption, however Ian responded that it was not clear to him that
> it was necessary to distinguish the summary from the caption in
> that way. Also, my HTML4all colleges did not support making the
> summary feature dependent on presence of <caption> in any way.
>
> However, <summary> as child of <figure> (and <canvas>) should not
> have the same serious DOM issues that <summary> as child of
> <figure> has. <figure> even allows to move the table caption to
> the caption of the <figure> element:
>
> "When a table element is in a figure  element alone but for the
> figure's legend, the caption element should be omitted in favour
> of the legend."[1] (In Ian's proposal, one would then move the
> summary content into the legend, together with caption content.)
>
> And as long as a table doesn't have a <caption> element, then the
> DOM problems of the <summary> element almost disappears. Hence, in
> those cases when one move the content of <caption> to the
> <figure>'s <legend> element, the use of <summary> as child of
> <table> would not face the same level of DOM problems.
>
> Thus, if the working group decides that, in line with the WCAG 2.0
> requirement, the summary feature needs to be a
> "programmatically-determined mechanism"[2][3], the <figure> gives
> us two options w.r.t. a <summary> element: <summary> could be a
> child of <table> or a child of <figure>.
>
> In a summary: If we are not looking narrowly at the <table>
> summary problem, but expand the problem to <figure> and <canvas>,
> then it should be easier to introduce the <summary> element.
>
> [1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/tabular-data.html#the-caption-element
> [2] http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/SummaryForTABLE
> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/conformance.html#uc-programmatically-determined-head


Best Regards,
Laura

-- 
Laura L. Carlson

Received on Thursday, 17 September 2009 12:33:18 UTC