Re: Table Techniques - Summary

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John M Slatin" <john_slatin@austin.utexas.edu>
To: "Roberto Scano - IWA/HWG" <rscano@iwa-italy.org>; "Matt May"
<mcmay@w3.org>; "Chris Ridpath" <chris.ridpath@utoronto.ca>
Cc: "WAI WCAG List" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2003 3:22 PM
Subject: RE: Table Techniques - Summary


>Roberto makes a good point when he asks "Why use the [summary]
>attribute" if the resource contains no text describing the purpose or
>organization of the table?
>
>The primary reason is to confirm that the absence of explanatory text
is
>deliberate rather than accidental.
>
>It occurs to me that the problem of identifying table types could be
>solved by providing a type attribute for the table element; legal
values
>could be "layout" or "data." or An attribute called "layout" whose
>values could be either "yes" or "no," could also work.  These would
>become part of the XHTML spec.

All, as for the proposal of Jaws creator of the new attribute
"ContextHelp" depends from the possibility to apply it into the new
version of XHTML. But at now[1] summary is used and these new attributes
that u referer to are not used.

I agree with you that the deliberation to use summary="" instead of not
use it but at this point instead of use summary="" for the layout tables
why don't use directly summary="[layout]" and "educate" the screen
readers that this is a layout table?

Empty attribute means that there is no need of description but for eg.
the difference between alt="" and summary="" is that "alt" is a
*required* attribute instead of "summary" that is an *optional*
attribute.


Roberto Scano
---
[1]
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-xhtml2-20030506/mod-tables.html#sec_19.3

Received on Friday, 15 August 2003 09:33:31 UTC