Re: summary="" in HTML5 ISSUE-32

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Feb 2009, Matt Morgan-May wrote:
>> On 2/26/09 2:46 PM, "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>>>> Come up with something better, and *deprecate* the old feature in 
>>>> order to make the transition.
>>> That's in fact exactly what HTML5 does today.
>> No. The current spec _obsoletes_ the old feature, and offers an existing 
>> feature as something better. That's pretty far from "exact".
> 
> The closest HTML5 comes to "deprecating" anything is the "downplayed 
> errors" concept, which summary="" is party to. <caption> is redefined to 
> cover all the features summary="" had, and is better.
> 
> I don't really see how that is different from what Julian suggested.

A "downplayed error" is still an error. That is different from something 
being valid, but deprecated.

Furthermore, <caption> does NOT do what @summary is supposed to do. Compare:

"This attribute provides a summary of the table's purpose and structure 
for user agents rendering to non-visual media such as speech and 
Braille." -- <http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html#adef-summary>

with

"The caption element represents the title of the table that is its 
parent, if it has a parent and that is a table element.

The caption element takes part in the table model.

The caption element should be included for any table where the reader 
might have difficulty understanding the content or where the table's 
structure would not be obvious to the user of a screen reader. The 
element's contents should describe what the purpose of the table is, 
along with any information that could be useful for understanding and 
using the table." -- 
<http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-caption-element>

I further note that the current definition in HTML 5 is inconsistent. 
First it says that it is the "title of the table", then it describes 
something different.

BR, Julian

Received on Friday, 27 February 2009 12:16:39 UTC