SUMMARY

This is an attempt to provide a Solomonic solution to the summary 
impasse, by reclassifying summary as an element with a limited set 
of allowed textual markup, but no active elements, in order to 
provide the functionality that those who have used summary as an 
attribute have found lacking in a mechanism that limits summary 
content to an attribute value, which cannot be annotated or 
semantically marked-up. The element summary should be available 
through the DOM, but not rendered along with the table by default.


RATIONALE

If authors and developers are used to the concept of using the summary 
attribute for the TABLE element in HTML4x, why not simply change 
summary from an attribute to an element? As an element, summary provides 
those who have actually used the summary attribute, with capabilities 
which are not possible when summary is an attribute; one of the 
internationalization issues authors have faced when using the summary 
attribute is how to provide multi-lingual versions of information when 
it is limited to an attribute value, without the possibility of 
programmatically indicating natural language switches, through the use 
of the lang attribute.

If authors are as ignorant of the HTML4 attribute summary as some in the 
HTML WG have claimed, then they won't be confused by an HTML5 element 
named summary which is the child of CAPTION and which cannot have active 
child elements.

For legacy content, summary attribute values should be mapped to the 
summary element.


DETAILS

   1. the purpose of the summary element is to convey contextual and 
      orientational information about tabular data; as an element 
      without active content, the summary element provides authors 
      and content developers with a means of programmatically 
      annotating and clarifying such summarization information;

   2. summary is a child of CAPTION

   3. the summary element may contain: @lang, ABBR, DFN, OL, UL, LI, 
      STRONG, EM, DL, DD

   4. the summary element CANNOT contain activatable text


IMPACT

Positive Effects

    * Provides authors with a means of semantically marking 
      summarization information 

    * Provides authors with a means of indicating that there is 
      strucuted text contained inside of TABLE cells

Negative Effects

    * None: the transition from summary the attribute to summary the 
      element is an example of graceful evolution 

Conformance Classes Changes: None

RISK

Changing summary from an attribute to an element does not provide the 
types of "risk" inherent in other proposals concerning summarizing text 
for TABLE, because the basic concepts and terminology applies; the 
benefit is the ability to provide structured text in the summarizing 
information (such as OL, UL, LI, which studies have shown are better 
than prose to convey information to certain user groups.