Re: ACTION-128: Draft @summary voting text in conjunction with PF

On Jul 8, 2009, at 3:39 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Wed, 8 Jul 2009, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>
>> For many of the other obsolete features, the basic position is that  
>> they
>> should not be used in new documents, but it may not be worth  
>> expending
>> effort to purge them from old documents. So just labeling them  
>> obsolete
>> gives enough guidance to authors and conformance checkers. But
>> summary="" is not quite like that.
>
> In what sense is it different? I thought it was exactly like that;  
> that's
> why I edited the spec as I did.

I think the differences are:

- There may be valid reasons to use summary="" other than inertia of  
an existing document base.
- The reason it's obsolete is less obvious. For some of the other  
obsolete but conforming features, the reason is fairly obvious from  
the given alternative. But the reason summary="" is problematic is  
nowhere to be found in the spec.

For these reasons, I think it is helpful to explain the problems with  
summary="", more so than for the other attributes. I think the  
explanation could be either in the section on explanatory information  
for tables, or in the obsolete features section, but either way I  
think it is helpful to provide it.

That being said, I don't really want to micromanage the exact spec  
text. I'm just explaining why I think further explanatory material in  
the spec text is merited.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Wednesday, 8 July 2009 23:42:37 UTC