Joshue O Connor wrote:
On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, Ian Hickson wrote:
Is the need not served by <caption>?
No. A caption is provided visually. [...]
It is also worth noting that <caption> is a terse descriptor. @summary
is a long descriptor.
Since this is clearly going to be a long discussion it might help (and
would certainly help me) if we start from clear premises. So it would be
great if statements like "<caption> is..." could be clear about whether
they are referring to spec requirements, actual author practice, some
sort of best practice (that may or may not match actual common
practice), or something else, along with pointer to the relevant
documentation/evidence.
In this case I can't see anything in a HTML spec to back up your claim
that <caption> must be terse whilst @summary must be long. In general it
seems problematic to require that caption be terse because certain types
of documents inherently have long table captions; scientific papers
often put a paragraph or more of text in the table caption explaining
how to read the table, for example.
