Janina and everyone.
(Personal response.)
In our internal debates at the HTML4all.org initiative, ideas
about a generalized <summary> element was put forward. By
generalized, it was meant that it could play the summarizing role
both for <table>, <figure> and (perhaps) for <canvas>.
The very idea about a <summary> element *only* for <table> has
already been presented for Ian, but the idea was put aside due to
serious DOM compatibility problems with current Web browsers. As a
response, I proposed to have the <summary> element /inside/
caption, however Ian responded that it was not clear to him that
it was necessary to distinguish the summary from the caption in
that way. Also, my HTML4all colleges did not support making the
summary feature dependent on presence of <caption> in any way.
However, <summary> as child of <figure> (and <canvas>) should not
have the same serious DOM issues that <summary> as child of
<figure> has. <figure> even allows to move the table caption to
the caption of the <figure> element:
"When a table element is in a figure element alone but for the
figure's legend, the caption element should be omitted in favour
of the legend."[1] (In Ian's proposal, one would then move the
summary content into the legend, together with caption content.)
And as long as a table doesn't have a <caption> element, then the
DOM problems of the <summary> element almost disappears. Hence, in
those cases when one move the content of <caption> to the
<figure>'s <legend> element, the use of <summary> as child of
<table> would not face the same level of DOM problems.
Thus, if the working group decides that, in line with the WCAG 2.0
requirement, the summary feature needs to be a
"programmatically-determined mechanism"[2][3], the <figure> gives
us two options w.r.t. a <summary> element: <summary> could be a
child of <table> or a child of <figure>.
In a summary: If we are not looking narrowly at the <table>
summary problem, but expand the problem to <figure> and <canvas>,
then it should be easier to introduce the <summary> element.
[1]
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/tabular-data.html#the-caption-element
[2] http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/SummaryForTABLE
[3]
http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/conformance.html#uc-programmatically-determined-head
--
leif halvard silli
