[thelist] Table Summary Attribute

Melanie Archer mejarc at twobanjos.tierranet.com
Thu Jun 14 13:38:17 CDT 2001


Good day, Niklaus,

If you're working with table-based layout the summary attribute can be 
helpful to development,
not just for accessibility purposes.

A while back I tweaked a DTD so that valid HTML for a particular project 
*required* summaries on all the tables, because there were so many nested 
tables (yuck) necessary to achieve the design.  The formula I used for the 
contents of the summaries was as follows:

<table....summary="layout table: visual display stunt"...>
or
<table....summary="data table: righteous format for tabular data"...>

Well, okay, maybe the actual summaries differed :)

I gathered the idea for the "layout table:" and "data table:" wording from 
the W3C site:
http://www.w3.org/

Different advice is at 
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#table-summary-info

AFAIK visual browsers just shrug at this attribute and pass it through 
without display.
Like you, I'm curious  how/when  nonvisual browsers render the summary 
attribute.

Enjoy,
M Archer
http://www.twobanjos.tierranet.com





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