RE: [webwatch] Tables, yet again

On Friday, March 02, 2001 at 00:01, asgilman@iamdigex.net (Al Gilman) wrote:

> In addition, SUMMARY is not always required for accessible content, either. 
> The first place to put overview information for a table is in the CAPTION
> element if you want it to show visually at all times.  It is also possible to
> put a brief TITLE attribute on the TABLE element itself.  Either of these may
> be sufficient.  A SUMMARY should be written to expand on these, if they
> exist. 
> If the CAPTION or TITLE already says all there is to say, there need be no
> SUMMARY.  

And additionally, if the TABLE is being used to impose layout on the
page and conveys no information, SUMMARY and CAPTION can (and should) be
absent. In such cases the use of the TABLE does need to degrade
gracefully so that it doesn't impact viewers whose clients can not
display tabular data very well. A single table with a single cell on
each row used to force a specific width is an example of such a table.
Moving forward such tables should be replaced by the use of CSS.

-- 
Christian Smith  |  csmith@barebones.com  |  http://web.barebones.com
PGP Fingerprint  -  60E5 2216 97D2 1D1A B923 F036 00A9 CEC0 D411 FA89

Received on Friday, 2 March 2001 08:17:19 UTC