Re: Summary attribute: attention and focus

Good stuff sam, too complex for me though so I guess I'll bough out  
from vollunteering anything further on this topic in this forum.

On Mar 2, 2009, at 12:38 AM, Sam Ruby wrote:

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 11:41:34 UTC