Re: Taking another round at @summary

Jonas Sicking, Tue, 5 Jan 2010 23:38:13 -0800:

> So my question is why should we have @summary in the spec? As
> far as I can tell all the problems that @summary aimed to solve, are
> already solved by aria-describedby. And solved better than @summary
> does.

If we compare these 2 examples:

<table aria-describedby="an_ID_somewhere"> 
<table          summary="This table looks like so and  so.">

then, for @summary, we know what kind of text we are supposed to find 
there - a text that helps you read the table by describing its 
structure. Comparably, we don't know what kind of description 
aria-describedby will contain - I think we risk that it only points to 
vaguely related material. It is a general problem with the current 
draft that the only thing that is specifically dedicated to explain the 
table structure, is an obsoleted attribute - @summary.

To replace @summary with ARIA we would need a new, dedicated ARIA 
attribute:

<table aria-summarizedby="an_ID_somewhere">
-- 
leif halvard silli