Summary attribute: attention and focus

Steven Faulkner wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have taken up Sam Rubys suggestion:
> 
> "As for me, what I would most like to see in the next draft is a RFC
> 2119 compatible definition for table summaries, either in terms of a
> HTML 4 compatible attribute or in terms of a suitable replacement.
> Note that I am specifically saying "in a draft".  What I am *not*
> looking for is a reply to this email on how such a topic might be
> approached." [1]
> 
> and taken a stab at a RFC 2119 compatible definition for table summaries:
> http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/SummaryForTABLE/SummarySpecification
> 
> If you have positive contributions to make to this definition please
> add comments to the wiki page in the notes section
> 
> thanks to gez lemon for help with this.

I see some good progress and some not so good progress.  First the good 
stuff:

Thanks to the both of you, and thanks to rburns and LeifHalvardSilli for 
contributing.  At the present time, we have 23 revisions of that wiki page.

http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/SummaryForTABLE/SummarySpecification?action=info

Now for the bad stuff: here is the amount of posts so far this month 
(and look at the calendar, this month just got started) alone with 
subject lines containing the word summary:

17 Leif Halvard Silli
  9 Robert J Burns
  6 Philip TAYLOR
  6 Gez Lemon
  4 David Poehlman
  2 Steven Faulkner
  2 Smylers
  1 William Loughborough
  1 Steve Axthelm
  1 Ian Hickson

I'd like to suggest as a homework assignment for everybody on that list 
who posted more than twice on this subject yesterday alone: namely to 
watch the following video before posting on this subject again on this list:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645

Don't get turned off by the title of the talk.  No, I'm not calling any 
of you poisonous.  But 186 posts in 7 days on 1 subject is a bit 
overwhelming.  None of this would be a problem if the bulk of the posts 
were of the form "if you were to change proposal x in the following 
way...", but that's not what I am seeing.

After you complete this homework assignment, I would like to try a 
little experiment.  Let's all try to avoid pronouns in posts on this 
subject for a week, and in particular lets try really hard to avoid the 
words "you" and "I".  The subject we are talking about the moment isn't 
you or me or him or her, but summary attributes in general, and the 
proposals (three so far) on how the HTML5 spec should approach the subject.

After we have collected the proposals, lets try to eliminate ones that 
won't work for one reason or another.  I'll ask people to identify which 
proposals they can't live with, and why.

Once that's complete, and if there are any proposals left, then lets 
work on use cases that identify why such proposals should be included in 
HTML5.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Monday, 2 March 2009 05:39:05 UTC