Re: Hierarchies with tabular data...

Hi all,

This is my first contribution to the list, so hopefully it will be beneficial.

What we want to do say is that we have this hierarchical list where
each item in the list has a collection of data associated with it. We
might want to mix existing markup to say something like:

<ul>
  <li axis="state" id="ca" ><th>California</th>
       <ul>
          <li axis="city" id="sac"><th>Sacramento</th>
                <td axis="customers">3,000</td>
                <td axis="sales">$23,000,000</td>
          </li>
....
     </ul>
  </li>
</ul>

One of the things that I liked about XHTML2 drafts was the
generalization of headings. This seems to be more or less preserved in
HTML5. I think that this is way to go to solve this problem.

What I'm suggesting is that we generalize this to use a simple <h> and
<d> elements (the t is redundant at this point) and allow them as
children of lists, as well as rows. We could then rely on CSS to
provide the necessary style (which might require some changes, I
suppose, to handle this). Something like the existing header and
footer tags could be pressed into service for the table headers and
footers.

I think that generalizing the markup in this way will provide the
opportunity to build the kind of structures that we're talking about.
Keeping the axis and scope attributes will allow for the meaning of
the data to be preserved. Something like the advanced layout module of
CSS will allow the data to be presented intelligently even allowing
for one to say that this item of data should be rendered on two
physical rows.

It doesn't solve the rendering problem where different levels of the
heirarchy have different headers (ie nesting) but its one way to
describe the data in the hierachy.

Adam van den Hoven.
On 10/15/07, Ben Boyle <benjamins.boyle@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Do you have any links to sites which publish tables like that?
>
> Nothing beyond the example I already listed here:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Aug/0510.html
>
> Seen examples in print.
>
> ps: don't sub "all" for "any" in my posts and they'll make more sense.
> You used "more likely" in your post. That's what I was getting at.
> Hope that clarifies.
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 16 October 2007 03:33:58 UTC