Re: how to deal with TABLE heartburn

On Tue, 21 Oct 1997, Al Gilman wrote:

> There is another distinction which figures prominently in my
> thinking.  This is the distinction between the display axes
> and the axes of a conceptual model of the information, which
> may have different, or more than two, axes.

The intent of the scope/axes attributes is to allow authors
to provide the associations between headers and the cells
to which they apply. It turns out that the distinction between
header and data isn't quite so clean. Some cells act as both.
What matters is the ability to describe a cell's content in
terms of what other cells relate to it.

> The SCOPE attribute clearly operates in display coordinates,
> in terms of the rows and columns of the tabular array.
Yes - but this is only a matter of convenience, and a consequence
of the way many tables just happen to be layed out. Scope and
axes give the exactly the same information -- the associations
between header and data cells.

> This leaves me with the objection that the AXES concept is being
> stretched too far.

I don't see why. All you get is a means to associate headers with
other cells, including the means to define hierarchies of headers.

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 Wednesday, 22 October 1997 08:56:40 UTC