Simon Pieters wrote:
On Sat, 26 Jan 2008 19:59:29 +0100, Jean-Nicolas Boulay Desjardins
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The scope attribute was created to tell a screen reader to read a
table in a
certain way...
But now it has been remove from the spec.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-diff-20080122/#absent-attributes
It is still present for <th>.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-tabular.html#the-th
FWIW the HTML 4 behavior which turns a <td scope="somthing"> into a
heading from the point of view of the UA is, in principle, useful since
there are cases (particularly for row headings) where one cell is
effectively both data and a heading but the formatting should be
data-like rather than heading like. However I strongly doubt this is
actually used enough in practice to make it worthwhile; [1] shows very
few pages using it and a random selection of those I checked seemed to
be using it unnecessarily or incorrectly. In any case, it is only a
convenience, one could argue that a purer approach is to mark up
anything that a UA should regard as a heading as <th> and then change
the style as required.
Research and experimental implementation is being done currently with
regards to table heading/cell associations in order to come up with an
algorithm that makes UAs and ATs work better with the current Web and
that hopefully makes it easier for authors to create tables that are
accessible out of the box so authors don't have to jump through hoops
in order to make their tables usable for people with ATs.
On the subject of which, does anyone have a strong opinion on how
scope="colgroup" and scope="rowgroup" ought to work? For example, in the
following table, assuming the header is scope="rowgroup", the direction
is ltr, and there is only one rowgroup, which cells should it apply to:
| Cell 1 | Cell 2 | Cell 3 |
| Cell 4 | Header 1 | Cell 5 |
| Cell 6 | Cell 7 | Cell 8 |
What about cases where the scope is colgroup and the header trails into
parts of multiple colgroups
| colgroup 1 | colgroup 2 |
| Cell 1 | Cell 2 | Heading 1 | Cell 4 | Cell 5 |
| Cell 6 | Cell 7 | Cell 8 | Cell 9 | Cell 10| Cell 11|
These seem kindof like unimportant edge cases to me, but it seems like
these scope values are only going to be useful in uncommon situations,
so I guess someone might have a use case for one behavior over another...
[1]
http://canvex.lazyilluminati.com/survey/2007-07-17/analyse.cgi/tagattr/td/scope
