Re: TABLE

On Thu, 16 Oct 1997, Daniel Dardailler wrote:

> 
> This is my attempt to converge on one TABLE proposal from Dave and Al
> message.
...
> When tables are being used purely for visual layout, the issue is
> mainly one of reading order and style sheet are probably the best way
> to go int hat situation.

I think you mean "to address this issue" or some such.

> The AXIS attribute in HTML can be used to group rows or columns
> into related groups

This is misleading. AXIS is designed for grouping cells that
act to mark points along an axis, for instance dates, categories
of expenses, types of bagels, pizza toppings etc. The grouped
cells are not constrained to be in a given row or column. Axis
is used to group headers for two purposes:

  a) to allow style sheets to control when relevant headings
     are spoken either always before each cell, or just when
     the cell you have moved to corresponds to a different
     header in the same group, e.g. moving down a column, would
     suppress speaking the column header, while moving across
     a row ould suppress the row header. The style sheet property
     for this is in the latest CSS2 draft.

  b) to enable the table to be recast as a hierarchy, where each
     branch corresponds to choosing a header from a group. This
     gets away from a reliance on the visual arrange of table
     data and offers the possibility of being able to suppress
     or expand levels of detail.

Axis is therefore a valuable addition to table markup.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2984 (or 2521) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Thursday, 16 October 1997 07:46:47 UTC