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Re: Complex tables: Scope AND id and header attributes

for

From: _mallory
Date: Oct 28, 2015 1:29AM


On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 02:25:14PM +0000, Jonathan Avila wrote:
> > I would avoid headers/id by now (in html), it is being sunsetted
>
> Birkir, can you please provide a link(s) indicating where this technique is being sunsetted?

I remembered hearing this too a while back, yet had trouble finding
it. I had to look hard, but it seems headers attrs were being left
out of the HTML5 spec at some point and accessibility folks had to
bend over backwards to prove that there really were such things as
"complex tables."
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/IssueTableHeaders

Basically a group of people thought that either complex tables don't
exist (enough) to need headers attrs, or so what let's make a Scooby
Doo type algorithm (or a "magic cell") to replace headers.
The algorithm either never surfaced or was prone to failure too much
and as far as I can see HTML5 does now include headers attrs in both
w3c and whatwg versions.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/tabular-data.html#attributes-common-to-td-and-th-elements
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/tables.html#attributes-common-to-td-and-th-elements

I think they're here to stay and ok to use.
_mallory