WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Proposed: a TN tag to join TH and TD?

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 12, 2013 3:02PM

2013-06-11 16:57, Duff Johnson wrote:

> Here's the screen-shot I sent in the previous mail on this subject:
>
> http://duff-johnson.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/TN-cell-example.png

It has a meeting schedule, with starting times in one column, topics in
another. A fairly simple normal table - except that it has a row
containing the name of a track. So it acts as a heading for some rows
after it. And there is no real content for the first cell of that row,
though one might conceivably put the redundant starting time there.

Now that I come to think of it, tables often contain such headings.
Often people use the colspan attribute to make the header span all
columns, avoiding the issue discussed here. But there are situations
where that would not be feasible.

So this would be a candidate for the need for new markup. But I'm nor
sure how important it would be in practice. Anyway, if you want added
markup, I would still recommend trying a new attribute rather than new
element.

> "no-op" = no operation, or "intentionally blank".

The first one is procedural rather than logical or structural, and
"intentionally blank" does not really say why it is blank.

>> Just to clarify, you're describing cells that only exist to keep the table's
>> column/row structure intact, not to contain data.
>
> Exactly so.

A structural definition might be something like the following, assuming
we propose a new attribute:

The boolean attribute dummy in a td element indicates that the cell
exists only to satisfy the structural requirements on a table in HTML.
The content of the cell should be ignored, and it is normally empty.
A <td dummy> element is normally used when other cells in a row
contain row headers for the table as a whole or part thereof.
Common examples include the very first cell of a table where the first
row and the first column otherwise contain column and row headers
as well as a row that acts as a heading for some subsequent rows
so that the heading primarily relates to one column in those rows
and therefore all but one cells in that row are "dummy cells".

Yucca