[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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