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RE: Future of @summary in HTML 5

Written by Laura Wednesday, 15 July 2009

Thanks for this article, Josh, and for drafting voting text. The straw poll should help provide an indication of views and motivation among HTML working group members. Examples of table summary and new HTML working group members would be most welcome. As you are well aware the latest published HTML5 draft does not only obsolete the summary attribute, it does not provide a summary element or anything functionally equivalent. Instead HTML5 uses the caption element. The current draft text applies table summary functionality universally, and in a such way that it is not possible to distinguish the summary from the caption. Most of the debate around providing a summary mechanism has been about misunderstanding its purpose, so trying to merge its purpose with another element's purpose will be problematic leading to more confusion. The purpose of the caption element and the summary attribute have been completely different historically (caption titles the table, summary describes how the table should be read by people who cannot see how the table has been rendered). What is most worrying about not providing a table summary attribute is that no suitable functional replacement that satisfies accessibility needs exists in HTML5. If the summary attribute was to be removed and worked out of the system it should have been worked out gradually in a responsible manner and replaced with something better in collaboration with WAI.