Re: mark up for complex data tables

> summary="Table showing comparison of pupil's marks for xxxxx school by
> subject: comparison is by gender, with statistical neighbours, across the
> LEA and nationally.">

I think "purpose" would include what conclusions might be drawn from
a quick look at the table.  I don't think this really covers structure
at all.

>       <div align="center">data</div>

I've never understood the obsession with centring text on web pages, but
columns of figure should never be centred; they should be decimal 
point aligned, which, without style sheets, probably means right
aligned.

> bit confused by getting scope to cover more than one column. Also should I
> be using thead or header ids?

thead is fairly irrelevant, as it is more to do with multi-page printing/
display.  I don't seen any harm in doing this properly, but what I think
you need here is th on all the horizontal and vertical headings.  For
a user agent that complies with section 11.4.3 of the HTML 4 specification,
headers is likely to be unecessarily verbose.

You've also logically got column groups, although, except for shading
purposes, you might not gain much from making them explicit.

Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2001 20:13:31 UTC