Re: Working Group Decision on ISSUE-32 table-summary

Sam Ruby, Tue, 05 Apr 2011 10:19:14 -0400:

This re-poll came as a surprise. Didn't you make a decision after the 
previous poll? I believed you did and that the addition of the summary 
element CP could not result in radically new results, unless you chose 
to support the element proposal. Therefore and because there were new, 
fresh polls to answer in, I did not participate in the re-poll.

 [...]
> Overall, we continue to find that proposals that involve expressing
> summary in attribute form to attract stronger objections than the
> alternatives.  Between the remaining two proposals, we find the
> objections to introducing a new summary element to be stronger than
> simply relying on the existing aria-describedby attribute.
 [...]
> === Revisiting this Issue
> 
> This issue can be reopened if new information come up. Examples of
> possible relevant new information include:
> 
> * Identification of specific use cases, along with a number of
>   specific examples from real-world sites, where a separate table
>   summary would be useful either instead of or in addition to a caption
>   element or an aria-describedby attribute.   Ideally such use cases
>   would explain why this is needed only for tables but not also for
>   images or canvas elements which could express the same information
>   using a different mechanism.
> 
> * First hand statements from authors of development tools currently
>   implementing the summary attribute that the making the summary
>   attribute obsolete would present an unacceptable burden or that it
>   would significantly inhibit the adoption of HTML5 by the tools that
>   they produce.
> 
> * Identification of specific operational problems with the
>   aria-describedby attribute that make it not able to be
>   programmatically determined or suitable for use as a table summary.

@aria-describedby has become this poster child for everything. The real 
thing is ARIA, in its entirety: You don't remove hidden data by 
removing @summary. Because, authors can simply use aria-label instead. 
So we could ask: does @summary provide something @aria-label doesn't 
provide? 
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Tuesday, 5 April 2011 17:32:53 UTC