- From: Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no>
- Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2007 06:36:38 +0200
- To: HTMLWG <public-html@w3.org>
2007-09-07 21:13:03 +0200 "Ben 'Cerbera' Millard" <cerbera@projectcerbera.com>: [ ... What Anne says about TABLE in his blog ... ] > Oh, and I'm [famous] now. :-) If you are new to the HTML5 tables effort, that > blog entry from Anne is an excellent introduction, imho. > [famous] <http://annevankesteren.nl/2007/09/html-tables> I would have appreciated if Anne cared to be more accurate. Quote: >> Tables in HTML >> >> [...], but things can get slightly more complicated. For these cases >> HTML4 provides a scope attribute and in case all else fails a headers >> attribute. Anne's very own example table, is a TABLE which, in HTML4, actually doesn't need either @SCOPE or @HEADERS [1] - according to the table inspector. But when one do not understand how @SCOPE works in HTML4, then one can actually destroy things, which is what also happens in Anne's example table - when using the HTML4 algorithm. (Which proves why it is important to be able to inspect tables.) >> The former is based on the structure of the table and the latter lets >> you directly link a data cell to several header cells using ID values. Yes, @HEADERS can also be used to solve «impossible» things. But the normal use is to use @HEADERS as part oft the basic algorithm of HTML4. I.e. to use @HEADERS to work *with* the natural tabel structure. And not to use it to work against it. (See how Ferg does it <http://www.ferg.org>) >> When writing tables it would be far more convenient however if you >> didn’t need to include these attributes (much like you can omit >> </td>, </tr>, <tbody> et cetera). So why, have you included @SCOPE in your table example then? HTML4 doesn't need it. Only current HTML5 algorithm needs them. >> Omitting these attributes is also likely what the majority of authors >> will do, when they are not busy abusing table for layout purposes, so >> having good algorithms in place to determine header cells has some >> advantages. Here you bring in layout purposes: The biggest problem we have is that peope are not using the TH cells at all. And this is probably related to the layout abuse, where TH-cells can cause unwanted bold text etc - and so authoring tools have gotten the habit of not proposing tables with TH. So really, we need better author tools - tools which automatically propose TH-cells in topmost row and leftmost column. >> [...] thanks to Ben Millard there is a fourth algorithm called "smart >> colspan" which would make my usage of scope in the Tour du Mont Blanc >> table superfluous. Which it allready is - in HTML4. >> Based on the fact that the header spans the entire first row of a >> rowgroup it implicitly becomes the rowgroup header according to this >> algorithm as I understand it. The biggest problem moving forward is >> categorizing all the use cases and making sure it works ok >> everywhere. We don’t want to optimize the wrong things. (It should be >> noted that Ben Millard is probably on top of that with his >> Collections of Interesting Data Tables.) Ben and James, are you also looking into improving the HTML4 algorithm? Or are you only looking to improve the HTML5 algorithm? [1]<http://annevankesteren.nl/2007/09/tmb-overview> -- leif halvard silli
Received on Saturday, 8 September 2007 04:36:51 UTC