*Henri Sivonen*, 2006-10-29:
http://blog.fawny.org/2006/10/28/tbl-html/
* HTML has samp, var, and kbd. I use all of them and I am
pretty much the only one who does.
FWIW, I think <samp> and <kbd> don't deserve to be in HTML and I am
not convinced that the use cases for <var> could not be satisfied
by <i>.
I consider
<a href="foo.xga"><samp><img src="foo.qvga" alt="Foo"></samp></a>
more semantic than the frequent
<a href="foo.xga"><img src="foo.qvga" class="thumbnail"
alt="Foo"></a>.
Alas nobody is using it that way. (What kind of |rel| could one use
for this kind of links BTW?)
If |kbd| is understood as a general element type for any user input/
action, no online software or hardware documentation or help file
could do without it and there are a lot of these. In practice it is
sometimes considered to mean "key" instead and thus styled with
"border-style: outset".
* “HTML5” has meter (for measurements) and t for time notation.
Joe Clark basically disqualifies himself here for any serious
comments on any standard, because he appears to only skim over them,
not read them. (What makes it worse is his repeated mentioning of is
wrongly-guessed understanding of |meter|.) Despite that, an element
type for measurements, i.e. pairs of value and unit, might not be the
worst idea, although low in priority.
* annotation
* note and reference for footnotes, endnotes, and sidenotes
(not aside in “HTML5”)
That's basically all the same (to me), just presented differently,
except that some footnotes may well be rendered inline -- e.g. like
this -- and |aside| always is a paragraph of its own.
* Ban tables for layout.
As long as graphic designers want to use grid-based layouts,
telling them to fake them with floats or, worse, positioning is
jumping from the frying pan into the fire. (And telling them to use
display: table; doesn't work if IE doesn't support it.)
I think the best thing to do is declaring a |table| that is the only
child of |body| (perhaps not counting text nodes and enclosing |div|)
to be a layout table -- always. All other tables would have to be
semantic. This would make many simpler ones of the existing table-
layout sites conforming, but at the same time (preferably strongly)
discouraged nested layout tables. Another option was an extra
attribute for |table|. I still think a 2- to ca. 5-cell layout table
doesn't harm anyone (if done right), but benefits many until the
browser world changes for a better. And HTML5 isn't that semantically
pure anyway.
In practice, as far as mobile accessibility for me is concerned
with today's shipping software, traditional single-column HTML
works great, table layouts are a bit annoying but mostly harmless
and the supposedly accessible cool CSS stuff can make content
unreadable.
You can tell a misguided or under-experienced CSS advocate by his
recommendations incorporating |float| for layout purposes (and some
similar flaws).
Even those devilish frames /may/ be more accessible than CSS layouts,
when the frameset is displayed as a plain list of links.
