In the Public preview of VO when it ran on panther
There was no public preview of VO. There was a public invitation to a private confidential beta test, but that is hardly the same thing as a public preview like Apple is doing with BootCamp. My recollection of that time is that VoiceOver was always in such a state of flux that it was never really stable enough to seriously evaluate its performance with standards compliant web sites. Good luck pointing me to discussion thread on MacVisionaries where the subject of navigating data tables was the subject du jour.
I believe there has also been discussion of how to code pages to take advantage of safari.
Such discussions have been very limited, like how to display a "Welcome Safari user" badge. Safari is a standards compliant browser. In order to code pages to take advantage of Safari, one codes valid HTML, end of story. Safari gets better at being standards compliant with every release. Coding a page to take advantage of some known quirky Safari specific bug would be impractical at best. No one does that. Yes, plenty of people code to IE quirks. That is wrong headed too, but at least the practice is explained by market share.
I have stated before and will state again that we should be able to use the table commands provided in VO in safari
Thank you. I do not believe you have stated that before.
but that It would probably depend on whether or not Safari exposes the information required.
Rather an immaterial and theoretical distinction, do you not agree? The folks responsible for Safari are the same ones responsible for VoiceOver. Again, blaming this data table problem on Safari and not VoiceOver is about as pointless as blaming the intra-document link problem on Safari and not VoiceOver.
I have also found that Many tables are not worth Navigating as tables for reasons previously stated.
That is another off-topic observation. I have specifically been soliciting for help with data tables that benefit from the ability to navigate along both axis.
