- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
- Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 08:52:58 +1000 (AEST)
- To: WAI Markup Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Chuck's proposal is a positive development in that it attempts to synthesise several of the issues. My main difficulty with it is that it does not sufficiently develop the point which I made yesterday regarding logical structure. It is not simply a question of whether the reading order is reasonable when the table is presented in a linear form. Equally fundamental is the question of whether the logical structure (paragraphs, lists, quotations, headings, etc.) is retained when the table-related tags are deleted. A logical reading order only amounts to limited accessibility; knowing where the headings, list items, paragraph breaks, etc., occur in the document is very important, for purposes of transformation to braille and audio, for structural navigation and for comprehension when a document is presented in a serial medium. This is a priority 2, not a priority 3 issue. Thus I would emphasise correct structure as well as a logical reading order, and if this could be achieved succinctly (together with the existing requirement that only single-column tables be used), it would be possible to permit layout tables under these precise conditions only, and to add a note discouraging their use. I think that Chuck's position is very close to mine, the only remaining point of difference being the need to emphasise the importance of using correct structural markup within the table cells (as in the W3C home page) so that properly structured and semantically rich markup is present, and can be relied upon to format the document appropriately in ifferent media when the table-related tags are deleted.
Received on Thursday, 15 April 1999 18:53:05 UTC