Re: the "balloon help" gambit

On Thu, 2 Oct 1997, Al Gilman wrote:

> 
> This may be overkill at this point, but here is a pipe dream of
> how an authoring tool could automate the capture of
> suitable-for-audio annotation of a table.
> 
> Author composes table in WYSWYG fashion [actual database reports
> are different]. 

Here's my cut at how I see this working.

The author presses the insert table button on the toolbar.
A dialog appears, and she dials up the number of rows and
columns. She drag selects the cells and sets the style
properties. She also sets the table summary and caption.
By drag selecting rows or columns she can create row and
column groups respectively.

She clicks on each cell in turn and enters the text. A right
click on each header cell allows her to set the scope and abbr
attributes. The dialog allows her to move to the next header
cell without having to close the dialog. For tricky cases, she
sets the axis/axes attributes directly. Note that its this
dialog that is used to say whether a cell is a header or data
cell, and to set its class. I would also allow you to enter and
modify the selected cell's content in a field in this dialog
for extra convenience.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2521 (office) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Tuesday, 7 October 1997 13:28:26 UTC