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List:       whatwg
Subject:    Re: [whatwg] Early feedback on header association algorithm
From:       Henri Sivonen <hsivonen () iki ! fi>
Date:       2008-11-22 14:06:41
Message-ID: 9684B992-FFA2-4890-ACFA-D96F7610F803 () iki ! fi
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On Nov 22, 2008, at 15:50, Henri Sivonen wrote:

> On Oct 29, 2008, at 19:43, Aaron Leventhal wrote:
> 
> > 1. On this part:
> > "If there is a header cell in the table \
> > <http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/tabular-data.html#concept-table \
> > 
> > > whose corresponding |th \
> > > <http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/tabular-data.html#the-th-element \
> > >  | element has an ID that is equal to the value of id, then assign  
> > the first such header cell in tree order to the data cell. "
> > I don't want to implement a special local table only  
> > getElementByIdInTable. I'd rather have this reworded to something  
> > like
> > "If there is an element in the document with a corresponding ID  
> > (via getElementById) equal to the value of /id/, and it is a header  
> > cell in the current table, then assign it to the data cell."
> 
> 
> While implementing a special lookup method is something that one  
> would want to avoid, using getElementById has two problems:
> 
> 1) It makes the association brittle under copy and paste. Consider a  
> case where a page author creates a table with internal id references  
> and then a maintainer duplicates the table and edits the contents of  
> the copy table. Now the table coming later in the document order is  
> inaccessible but this brokenness is unobvious to a person who isn't  
> accessing the page with AT.
> 
> 2) It makes the reporting of table relationships not form a coherent  
> table. Consider a program that instead of allowing the user to  
> traverse the table an arc at a time tries to pull all the arcs from  
> the accessibility API and reconstruct the table in its own process  
> space. If there are arcs between tables, the result is not a table  
> structure at all.


Oops. I didn't read the text I quoted properly. Sorry. #2 was already  
dealt with.

However, wouldn't testing if the cell is in the current table already  
go a long way towards the complexity of implementing  
getElementByIdInTable?

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/


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