Re: Re[5]: <table presentation="pie"> (was: Re: <table chart="pie">)

On Mon, 27 Aug 2007 06:38:52 +0200, Dmitry Turin <html60@narod.ru> wrote:

> RK> A way to do this is applying a xsl stylesheet to the table...

> MR> you could use XBL 2.0, some scripting and the <canvas> element

> LH> There are already working solutions available for drawing graphs LH>  
> using script, <canvas> and/or SVG.
>
> What is easier for user: that you mentioned or
> to change @presentation="alphabet" to @presentation="pie" ?
>
> What is more convenient for user ?

I can see the use case for this too. Optimising presentation for people to  
use graphically is, in principle, a valuable accessibility technique.

But I think there are a number of practical problems that make this  
proposal a bad idea.

  - It increases the complexity of implementation. Issues include:
     + laying out a table or pie chart (since they probably take different  
amounts of space) will slow down the browser,
     + defining what to do with incompatible tables (just 1 column, of  
text? 3 columns? ...)

  - It gives no clarity about how to do layout - and for most authors that  
is a problem since they want control over the presentation. Optimising the  
presentation of graphics is very important for clarity. In order to do  
that, we would need to increase the complexity of the proposal - IMHO  
significantly.
  - There are other ways of doing this, that work currently. So I don't  
think this is a very high priority, and should not be in the first version  
of HTML 5

As far as I know, no browser implements this and no significant web  
content relies on it, so it is not about standardising something that has  
been tested and found useful.

So I think this proposal is not something that we should be working on  
right now. Without fixing the control of presentation, in particular, I  
think it is better to wait until browsers generally have a user-script or  
similar functionality, or we see widespread use of a standard script with  
no layout control, before we think about putting it into HTML (as opposed  
to relying on existing techniques).

(To directly answer your question, I think it is generally easier to take  
data from your spreadsheet, and have your spreadsheet generate a graph you  
can adjust until you like it, then post that into a page).

cheers

Chaals

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   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
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Received on Monday, 27 August 2007 12:36:59 UTC