Maybe there is a deeper problem if copy & paste doesn't work right
because of IDs?
Or maybe there should be a node.getDescendantById() method?
I don't know. It just seems odd to implement something special here for
that.
- Aaron
On 11/22/2008 3:06 PM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
On Nov 22, 2008, at 15:50, Henri Sivonen wrote:
On Oct 29, 2008, at 19:43, Aaron Leventhal wrote:
1. On this part:
"If there is a header cell in the table
<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/tabular-data.html#concept-table>
whose corresponding |th
<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/tabular-data.html#the-th-element>|
element has an ID that is equal to the value of id, then assign the
first such header cell in tree order to the data cell. "
I don't want to implement a special local table only
getElementByIdInTable. I'd rather have this reworded to something like
"If there is an element in the document with a corresponding ID (via
getElementById) equal to the value of /id/, and it is a header cell
in the current table, then assign it to the data cell."
While implementing a special lookup method is something that one
would want to avoid, using getElementById has two problems:
1) It makes the association brittle under copy and paste. Consider a
case where a page author creates a table with internal id references
and then a maintainer duplicates the table and edits the contents of
the copy table. Now the table coming later in the document order is
inaccessible but this brokenness is unobvious to a person who isn't
accessing the page with AT.
2) It makes the reporting of table relationships not form a coherent
table. Consider a program that instead of allowing the user to
traverse the table an arc at a time tries to pull all the arcs from
the accessibility API and reconstruct the table in its own process
space. If there are arcs between tables, the result is not a table
structure at all.
Oops. I didn't read the text I quoted properly. Sorry. #2 was already
dealt with.
However, wouldn't testing if the cell is in the current table already
go a long way towards the complexity of implementing
getElementByIdInTable?
