A Simple Extension for RDFa Table Support

Hi everyone,

Our research group has been building several wiki- and blog-based tools for
which RDFa support would be a great fit. While looking at how we might
integrate it, we came upon a suggestion for how RDFa might achieve a cleaner
representation when used with tables.

The fact that the <COL /> element of a table doesn't actually contain
anything makes it impossible (under the current rules) to stash meaningful
information there from the RDFa perspective. This means that we can put
structured information across each row of a table, but not down each column,
leaving us to repeat a lot of RDFa annotation information across each row.
Here is a pseudocode example:

<TABLE>
  <TR><TH>First</TH><TH>Last</TH></TR>
  <TR subject="tj"><TD property="first">Thomas</TD><TD
property="last">Jefferson</TD></TR>
  <TR subject="ja"><TD property="first">John</TD><TD
property="last">Adams</TD></TR>
</TABLE>

What if instead, when parsing the DOM to extract structured information,
whenever a <TD> element is encountered, the corresponding <COL> element is
treated as if it were the DOM parent of the <TR> element for that cell. This
would allow us to stash information both on the rows *and* the columns of
the table, allowing for a much more compact representation:

<TABLE>
  <COL property="first" /><COL property="last" />
  <TR><TH>First</TH><TH>Last</TH></TR>
  <TR subject="tj"><TD>Thomas</TD><TD>Jefferson</TD></TR>
  <TR subject="ja"><TD>John</TD><TD>Adams</TD></TR>
</TABLE>

Let us know what you think. It makes tables fit much more naturally, from
our personal aesthetic point of view. As such, it may make it much easier
for template writers (think blog themes, Wikipedia Info Boxes, etc) to
incorporate into their templates and content.

Best,
Ted Benson & David Karger

MIT CSAIL Haystack
http://haystack.csail.mit.edu