RE: Tables and the Summary attribute + Nielsen on PDFs

"In the real world, the only sort of browsers are visual media type"

I don't understand this.

About a year and a half ago, the seemingly default consensus (as I saw it)
with respect to layout tables was to declare it as summary="layout table".
Things move on however.

I feel that '<img ... alt="" />' is being badly compared with '<table ...
summary="">'. The img element is *always* a very simple object; TABLEs have
anything from a few cells to hundreds if not thousands of elements that a
screen reader will need to decipher and present to the user; if the user is
advised at the outset that the table is indeed a "layout table", then surely
(whether this layout table has 2 or 2000 TD elements) the said user can make
a judgement as to the validity of whether to spend time trying to decide
whether the table has an implicit and real data structure or not.

Banster

-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of David Woolley
Sent: 22 September 2005 22:12
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Tables and the Summary attribute + Nielsen on PDFs



> Too, I cannot imagine but just a few instances today where one would use a
> blank image alt rather than CSS. This practice is archaic.

I don't understand this.  In the real world, the only sort of browsers
are visual media type, and in the real world most authors let alt
default to (illegally) missing or to whatever their authoring tool
inserts (e.g. duplicating the src attribute).

Received on Thursday, 22 September 2005 22:53:22 UTC