Re: table headers - clear description of problem

On Aug 26, 2008, at 17:29, Laura Carlson wrote:
> Source:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2007Jun/0021.html
[..]
> Source:
> http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/TableHeadersTestingBug5822#head-4dd98a1e6b2646ef8c2be83dd7b6c93622e25f4b


It seems that the problem description for headers/id is backwards  
compatibility in case where authors are competent and willing to cater  
for existing UAs not making good use of <th> semantics.

It appears, though, that if client software is not assumed to be  
frozen, for the next generation of client software the general  
approach taken by the spec (not necessarily exactly as written) is  
better than the headers/id approach, since there less room for author  
error when tables are edited and less participation from authors  
required, which should improve overall accessibility of tables on the  
Web scale. (It seems to me that implementation-wise the right place to  
put the association algorithm is browser engines that report stuff to  
AT--not AT itself.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Tuesday, 26 August 2008 15:12:15 UTC