Quoting Leif Halvard Silli <l...@malform.no>:
James Graham On 09-06-04 13.11:
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.
HTML 4.01 on @summary (versus <caption>):
[1][2]: "summary [...] purpose/structure for speech output"
[3]: "Each table may have an associated caption (see the CAPTION
element) that provides a short description of the table's purpose. A
longer description may also be provided (via the summary attribute) for
the benefit of people using speech or Braille-based user agents."
Oh, interesting. I had forgotten that HTML 4 did things like define
element semantics in multiple places.
It seems like it doesn't really allow for the use case of documents
that require extended table captions for all readers, which is clearly
bad.
