[CEUD-ICT] The future of the @summary in HTML

[Joshue O Connor]

Hi all,

There will soon be a HTML 5 working group vote on whether the summary
attribute (@summary) should be reinstated in HTML 5. It is currently
obsolete. My view (and that of others with experience of accessibility
in the HTML 5 WG) is that @summary should be re-instated. There are
potentially better solutions for the what summary does, but currently
what @summary does it does well. It is limited, in that it is not
suitable as a semantically rich long descriptor but it is useful for
backwards compatibility and while its use in the wild is often very poor
and the real world examples are often poorly authored, that does not
take away from its usefulness that I have seen in user tests etc. Also
as many here know, the wild is not an example of best practice. [1]

There are a couple of things that I would like some help with:

1) If list members know of examples of @summary that they have found
useful please send them onto me. These will ideally be complex data
tables, where the structure of the table is supplied via the @summary.

2) The HTML 5 working group is open for anyone to join, so if you are
interested and with to contribute, please do so or follow the
discussion. [2]

For a detailed overview of the issue and the work done over the past
couple of years, the ESW wiki is a good place to start. Also the public
HTML list is open for anyone to view. So if this is a topic of interest,
get involved! [3]

Cheers

Josh

[1]
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/tabular-data.html

[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/
[3]  http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/SummaryForTABLE


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