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Future of @summary in HTML 5

Wednesday, 15 July 2009

Thanks for the comment Laura. I agree that conflating the use of @summary and the caption element is a very bad idea and will only lead to confusion amongst authors. Disambiguation of the two in the HTML 4 spec should be continued in HTML 5, and while @summary is not perfect - and will in time need to be replaced by a better mechanism - we are not there yet. I hope that the final decision will be a sensible one, @summary should be valid in HTML 5, in particular for backwards compatibility and then gradually phased out with a new semantically rich element that extends @summaries capabilities.