- From: Arthur R. Murphy <arthur.murphy@arch.gatech.edu>
- Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 12:50:32 -0400
- To: David Bolnick <davebo@MICROSOFT.com>, WAI <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
W3C folks, From my perspective, the issue of table use is three separate questions: What formats should be supported in Mark Up Language (evolving specification); How should information be coded into Web pages given the current state of HTML; How should browsers display information coded as a table. The long-term solution requires us to be more explicit about content versus format. That is, to define the various structures (arrangements of information) which will be supported, and to define the coding of each one. The goal should be a recognition that, despite increasing bandwidth, there will always exits text- only browsers, and despite higher density screens, there will be a need for speech synthesis of the display. Thus, design and evaluation should involve Lynx-type browsers and speech synthesis of visual browsers. Three specific formats are now overloaded into the Table Code: Tabular Data, (e.g. name and phone number lists), best understood as rows of information; columns, best understood as a linear structure which wraps from lower left to upper right; a Table-of-Contents block, best understood as meta-information for the page. My experience has been that Lynx does a reasonable job at resolving all three forms by displaying the contents of each cell on a row-by-row basis. This works for tabular data, and is acceptable if the column is a single row, and may work for a Table- of-Contents block. The shortcomings of this technique are not the result of Lynx restrictions, but the incompleteness of the full Markup language specification combined with the longstanding tradition of not using the column / row specification. My recommendation is that we agree on a complete list of display structures, (e.g. rows of information, columns of text, etc.), generate a sample set of these coded in current HTML techniques. We might try some Style Sheets that support text only browsers, Style Sheets that support visual browsers for low vision access, Style Sheets that support visual browsers with synthetic speech. This effort may inform the specific needs of Web designers, and also clarify the range of data structures supported for all Internet users. I have taken the liberty of expanding slightly the example of David Bolnick. <<http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~am33/Row_Col_Tables.html>http://www.prism.ga tech.edu/~am33/Row_Col_Tables.html> <http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~am33/Row_Col_Tables.html>http://www.prism.gat ech.edu/~am33/Row_Col_Tables.html Could there be a W3C site, which grows definitions and samples? ______________________________ Arthur R. Murphy, Research Scientist Center for Rehabilitation Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology 490 10th Street, Atlanta, GA 30332-0156 Voice: 404.894.0562 Fax: 404.894.9320 arthur.murphy@arch.gatech.edu http://barrier-free.arch.gatech.edu/BFE http://murmur.arch.gatech.edu/crt/
Received on Monday, 27 July 1998 12:49:43 UTC