- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 01:40:01 -0800
- To: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Cc: David Poehlman <poehlman1@comcast.net>, Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>, Robert J Burns <rob@robburns.com>, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net>, Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no>, James Graham <jgraham@opera.com>, Joshue O Connor <joshue.oconnor@cfit.ie>, Steve Axthelm <steveax@pobox.com>, Steven Faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com>, Simon Pieters <simonp@opera.com>, HTMLWG <public-html@w3.org>, wai-xtech@w3.org, wai-liaison@w3.org, janina@rednote.net, Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>, Matt Morgan-May <mattmay@adobe.com>, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, "W3C WAI Protocols & Formats" <w3c-wai-pf@w3.org>
On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote: > > On Feb 25, 2009, at 11:37 AM, Jonas Sicking wrote: > >> >> If we added an attribute like summaryfor="idOfTable" to the <p>, would >> that address all the problems you have with this proposed solution? Or >> adding a summaryIn="idOfPara" on the <table>. I'm not suggesting this >> as a solution, merely trying to understand your complaints with the >> <p> solution. > > I believe ARIA already provides the markup to express this in a way that > generalizes to all elements, namely aria-describedby. This is very interesting. Could this be used as a replacement for @summary then? Are there any use cases not supported by such a solution? This also brings up an interesting question: Is there a reason why only <table>s need summaries? I.e. couldn't a <ol> or <section> be in just as big need for the functionality @summary was intended to provide in HTML4? Or are tables considered inherently more complex and thus in a bigger need for summaries? If summaries would indeed be useful for more things than tables I think all currently proposed solutions fail this fairly important use case. Including the solution currently in the current HTML5 drafts since only <table>s have <caption>s. The only suggested solution to that problem seems to be aria-descriebedby (or the naive version that I proposed in the above mail). This solution also has the benefit of allowing richer content in summaries, such as <em> and <a>. This would address a criticism that @alt often receives, that it lives inside an attribute rather than in elements, which I would think applies equally to @summary. / Jonas
Received on Monday, 2 March 2009 09:40:44 UTC