[thelist] Table Summary Attribute

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Thu Jun 14 10:04:18 CDT 2001


> From: Niklaus Haldimann <runciter at rosa.com>
> 
> Hmm. When my whole page consists of nothing but tables it's sort of
> futile to provide a description of these tables to browsers that
> cannot read their content. I always assumed non-table-capable browsers
> would just output text in the order of appearance within the table.
> Lynx does this, right? I don't think any real world browser can afford
> to ignore tables altoghether. I think I'm ditching the summary
> attribute ...

um, re-read my reply... you'll note we're talking about *data* tables, 
not layout tables...

that means tables where you show a chart, or some other grid of 
information, kind of like you might in Excel or something...

layout tables clearly would not benefit from either 'summary' or 
'caption', since they are just for layout and those attributes would 
be pretty meaningless when the table is linearized anyway...

given that, no, no 'real-world' browser can ditch tables, but we're not 
talking about that, either, we're talking about making some tabular 
data more accessible to the few who can't see it just by adding a 
'summary'... for 3 seconds of your time, i think it's worth it to help 
out those few users... otherwise, i think it's just a cop-out...





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