Table with ridiculously overdefined markup

<http://joeclark.org/access/cinema/reviews/home.html?IG#tabulation>

I put into this table every ridiculous header and accessibility 
feature I could. I opted not to dick around with axis, which is 
rather pointless for a table with a single header cell per *row*.

colgroup remains mysterious and ill-supported. I believe the span 
attribute of colgroup or an enclosed <col> element refers to the 
highest number of cells in that group (usually those positioned 
lowest in the table header). I wrote a whole book chapter on this 
(hi, Chris!) and I'm still not entirely clear on everything 
(especially axis), and much of it is vapourware anyway.

char and charoff don't work as planned (essentially, a hanging indent 
at the char="." character) in any  browser I can see.

I sent this around so people could break it in various devices, and 
the only issue I heard about was somebody's complaint of not 
understanding words like "Broken" or the suffix "-trix." This is the 
sort of thing I cannot help you about. However, if you have some kind 
of device that breaks with this table, do let me know. I don't care 
about version 4 of anything. We're talking progressive enhancement 
here.

And by the way, text-processing an already-sufficient table to add 
these features took me almost two hours of noodling in Excel and 
extensive search-and-replace in BBEdit. It was the holidays, I was 
booked off, and I was "tinkering," but nonetheless, it's too much 
work.

Table markup also added over 29,000 characters above and beyond the 
already-sufficient table. Many of us have produced entire Web pages, 
rich with "content," with fewer than 29,000 characters.

-- 

     Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org | <http://joeclark.org/access/>
     Author, _Building Accessible Websites_ | <http://joeclark.org/book/>
     Expect criticism if you top-post

Received on Wednesday, 14 January 2004 17:09:02 UTC