TABLE guidelines

I was rereading WD-WAI-PAGEAUTH-0203 in light of some real life
application of the guidelines and I have a question regarding the
requirements on table.

What's the difference between:

7.2 Avoid using tables to arrange text documents in columns.
and 
7.4 Avoid using tables to layout a page.

one is required, the other not, they both refer to layout of documents
using table construct. We should be more detail if possible.


7.1 is a REQUIRED about
 "Associate table cells with row and column labels explicitly"

This is about adding 'header' or 'scope' to the TABLE markup.

I wonder if a default algorithm (or set of default values for these
attributes, if you prefer) could not be described that would alleviate
the needs for updating all the table markup out there.

For instance, the TABLE example number 2 in the appendix adds
scope=col to a bunch of TH but it looks to me that a user agent can
very well infer that data from the fact that it's a bunch of TH in a
TR followed by a bunch of TD in TRs.

I kind of remember Dave Raggett describing such an algorithm for user
agent to follow. I need to look back in the archive.

I wouldn't want to make anything that can be achieved by a user agent
a REQUIRED.

Received on Tuesday, 24 February 1998 11:20:07 UTC