Last modified: 2013-12-01 11:14:17 UTC

Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

Wikimedia migrated from Bugzilla to Phabricator. Bug reports are handled in Wikimedia Phabricator.
This static website is read-only and for historical purposes. It is not possible to log in and except for displaying bug reports and their history, links might be broken. See T26583, the corresponding Phabricator task for complete and up-to-date bug report information.
Bug 24583 - wiki-text should support presentational tables
wiki-text should support presentational tables
Status: NEW
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
Parser (Other open bugs)
1.17.x
All All
: Low enhancement (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
: accessibility, parser
Depends on: 24659 57775
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2010-07-29 15:04 UTC by Daniel Kinzler
Modified: 2013-12-01 11:14 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Daniel Kinzler 2010-07-29 15:04:06 UTC
HTML tables should only be used for actual tabular data, not for grid-based layouts. When used for layout purposes, tables make it much harder for screen readers and similar aids to deliver a page's content to the user. 

Web designers have been struggeling with this for a long time, since proper grid-less css-based layouts are quite tricky. Trying to get wiki users to do this for banners, infoboxes, etc would be very hard.

Wikitext should offer a simple solution for this. Perhaps some variation of the {|...|} syntax that lets mediawiki know that this table is actually a grid layout rather then tabular data. It can then make a best effort of representing that grid in HTML - using div/CSS, or using HTML tables with special markers (like WAI-ARIA "presentation" role). In any case, wiki users should have a clean and simple way to mark up a grid layout, and distingush it from an actual table of data bits.

Grid layouts need to be nestable, while actual data tables probably shouldn't be. The transition however is not trivial.
Comment 1 Daniel Kinzler 2010-07-29 15:05:48 UTC
This report results from feedback from the German Central Library for the Blind
(DZB). Please see 
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accessibility#Feedback_from_the_DZB.2C_June_2010
for some background.
Comment 2 Derk-Jan Hartman 2010-07-30 16:25:58 UTC
We discussed this quite extensively on the English Wikipedia in the past (I think as late as last year for Infoboxes). I think the conclusion was: "Yes please, but unfortunately everyone would have to upgrade his browser to latest generation, so realistically, just not possible".

The warning boxes (mbox and friends) is the clearest example. We worked for months on something that was presented reasonably consistently on all browsers, and in the end we simply had to go with tables. We need almost everyone to be on IE8, FF3 and Safari 4.

So I guess we will need to use WAI ARAI roles for this. Such a property would need to be whitelisted in the parser first.
Comment 3 Daniel Kinzler 2010-08-04 08:37:46 UTC
FWIW, in r68230, i implemented a mode for the {|...|} syntax that would output divs with table-* styles instead of a html table. This is just a prove of concept, I don't think it will stay in the core, especially since it doesn't work with older browesers, as pointed out in #2.
Comment 4 Daniel Kinzler 2010-08-04 08:43:41 UTC
created bug 24659 for whitelisting WAI ARIA
Comment 5 Derk-Jan Hartman 2013-08-11 11:36:28 UTC
I note in the Sanitizer.php that we actually do support role="presentation" (no other roles though).

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.


Navigation
Links