[html4all] Summary Automatically Generated by User Agent

[Robert J Burns]

Hi Laura,

I think it is definitely a good idea to get UAs – especially assistive  
UAs – to provide better context and structural overviews of tables  
automatically, though I think this represents a poor replacement for  
the 'summary' attribute. Allowing users of assistive technology to  
query table structures is without a doubt helpful. However, summary is  
much more about the authorial intent for the table: especially when  
that authorial intent is readily apparent visually. While some day in  
the future AI might advance to the point of interpreting such visual  
clues programmatically, we are definitely not there yet.

As an example, consider this table:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(HTML_5)#Web_Forms_2.0 
 >

The author conveys a lot of information nearly instantly to the visual  
user. A summary attribute might read “While all four engines support  
'autocomplete', one of them, WebKit, also supports 'range' and Presto  
version 9.0 supports all of the Web Forms 2.0 features.”

Although it might be possible to imagine an algorithm that could come  
up with some rote version of that idea, I do not think such an  
algorithm generalizes very well. So I do not think it can replace the  
'summary' attribute (or some like mechanism). However, the ability of  
assistive technology to provide something like that in the absence of  
an author provided summary would be nice. Note too that a visual user  
does not need to read that summary: it is redundant with the visual  
consumption of the table itself.

In many ways this is similar to the headers work previously done.  
There the algorithms try to automatically associate the proper heading  
with its data. However, the author is still in control and can add  
attribute values to override those automatic associations.

Take care,
Rob

On Jun 27, 2009, at 2:48 AM, Laura Carlson wrote:

> Hello Everyone,
>
> Smylers and Simon Pieters have been brainstorming a table summary
> solution where the summary is automatically generated by the user
> agent. To quote [1]:
>
> "HTML 5 defines which headers apply to which cells, and obviously a
> user-agent knows which cells are merged, so possibly there could be an
> algorithmic way of generating descriptions of table structures for any
> (or at least a large proportion of) data tables. A user-agent could
> have a 'describe table structure' feature which is independent of an
> author providing a good (or indeed any) summary.
>
> "In terms of getting the information to those users who need it, this
> may have more success than engaging authors to write good summaries:
> user-agent developers seem on average more likely to follow the HTML 5
> spec than most authors, and there are fewer of them.
>
> "If this were possible it would reduce the number of tables which
> require a handwritten summary, reducing the burden on authors."
> unquote.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Thread starts at:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jun/thread.html#msg684
>

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