- From: David Dailey <david.dailey@sru.edu>
- Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:56:40 -0400
- To: public-html@w3.org
At Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:12:55 +0200 Alexander Graf wrote: [Lots of nice stuff, that I generally agree with ... ] +1 >They also have used nested <blockquote>s to increase indentation. How would >that work using attributes? I think it would confuse users even more. I agree, as I've mentioned, lots of teachers who use HTML think of it as ALL presentational. HTML is to many just a way to present information. To me it is a way of partitioning a rectangle. Would that those partitions were not all rectangular, and that the dimension of the thing being partitioned were higher than two! Perhaps an n-D generalization of Voronoi diagrams would make for a good browser topology. What fun! The screen rendering is then just an exercise in projective geometry -- with some weird boundary conditions owing to "semantic" concerns. But your question above, about multiple indentations and ease of slapping something together using blockquote for an upcoming class (FrontPage indents by inserting <blockquote>) made me ponder another situation: The use of tables as presentational vehicles. I don't know if the argument I am about to make holds water or not -- it may stem out of my simple ignorance about CSS. But I suspect there may be things for which <table> as a presentational device outdistances the performance afforded by styling. Consider: <style> td{text-align:center} </style> <table cellspacing="2" cellpadding="2" border="1"> <tr> <td rowspan="2">A</td> <td colspan="2">B</td> <td>C</td> <td rowspan="3">D</td> </tr> <tr> <td>E</td> <td colspan="2">F</td> </tr> <tr> <td rowspan="2" colspan="2">G</td> <td rowspan="2">H</td> <td>I</td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2">J</td> </tr> </table> Above, we have drawn a rectangle on the screen and partioned the rectangle into 10 smaller rectangles. (I have an ongoing offer of extra credit to anyone who can enumerate the number of distinct partitions thusly representable by a <table> with exactly n <td>'s using only colspan and rowspan attributes. The reader is encouraged to submit such solutions, but off-list please.) The table wizards in Macromedia Homesite, MS FrontPage, and Adobe Photoshop (there, it is called an image slicer), each provide ways of enabling the author to carve rectangles into sub-rectangles. Apparently the use case is strong enough that those three companies (now down to two) pursued a solution (and here I thought Adobe was fairly forward looking). I use the stuff for a) partitioning images into user-defined regions for subsequent morphing between two images and b) rapid prototyping of the onscreen aspects of interface design (the classic 2D stuff). Is there some easy way to build such an entity using styles which would render <table> obsolete for this purpose? If so, I suppose it is time for me to do some more reading on CSS. BTW what I don't have in mind is this: http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/javascript/ScreenPartition.html in which a page is filled with a domino tessellation of image thumbnails of differing aspect ratios. It uses no tables, but the scripting here is just a bit intense for your average user of an HTML editor. (I guess it's now too late to patent that, huh? oh well.) cheers, David Dailey http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/
Received on Friday, 20 April 2007 17:57:27 UTC