* Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> [Fri, 18 Jun 2010
15:40:54 -0400]:
....
Oh, I see. That's really terrible, then, and we
should avoid
presentational tables if at all possible. I think this really has to
be done on the content side, though, not on the software side --
auto-translating tables to divs sounds like a bad idea.
Maybe we could remove attributes like cellpadding, cellspacing, align,
etc. from the attribute whitelist. That would make it much harder to
use presentational tables, wouldn't hurt non-presentational table use
much, and would also improve our standards conformance (HTML5 bans
them). We'd have to announce this way in advance and give people
tools to adapt content before we break everything, but it'd be doable
if we really wanted.
Maybe it would be better to introduce non-standard (user-defined)
attribute of element (tag), to indicate the type of table ("real table"
or "layout table"), instead of breaking existing code? Then, screen
readers could easily pick the value of table element attribute to guess
whether column number and / or column header should be repeated or not.
I haven't looked what HTML5 specification says about validation of
user-defined attributes, though.
Dmitriy