On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Dmitriy Sintsov questpc@rambler.ru wrote:
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.
I think you could do something like <table role="presentation"> in HTML5. That would be invalid, since <table> must only be used for tabular data, but it's invalid already (just not automatically detectable). In theory, we should be able to mark it up so that at least ARIA-supporting UAs treat it reasonably.
It would be better to just use non-table markup, though.
On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 5:33 AM, Tisza Gergo gtisza@gmail.com wrote:
IE doesn't recognize display: table-*, and without that simulating presentational tables is a nightmare. Tables have an intelligent width computation algorithm (which might not be consistent between browsers, but still works pretty well in practice), AFAIK you cannot do anything even remotely similar with divs and display: block. And there are a lot of complicated use cases for navboxes - stacking them inside each other, making them collapsible etc. (There are easier targets such as {{ambox}} which doesn't really take advantage of having a table-based layout.)
I'm pretty sure that infoboxes can be done just fine with divs. Not exactly as they are now, but well enough. You can't get the exact auto-width algorithm for the cells, but in typical infoboxes it will be fine if you just set it to 50% or something. And even if that's not perfect, we could use display: table for everything but IE6/7, so only they get the slightly bad widths.
Those all have CSS equivalents, so all it would achieve is to make presentational tables look uglier in older browsers where the CSS versions of those attributes are sometimes buggy.
They don't have CSS equivalents that are realistically usable inline. For instance, to simulate the padding attribute, you'd have to add padding to each cell's inline style, as far as I know.
Presentational images do (or should) set the click attribute most of the time; that might be a useful heuristic to set alt="".
There is no attribute in HTML named "click", and I don't see any documentation for a wikitext image parameter by that name either.