- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 09:00:37 -0500 (EST)
- To: Michael Smith <smith@xml-doc.org>
- cc: <www-amaya@w3.org>, <Jose.Kahan@inrialpes.fr>
This would be a good thing to do, and would be an obvious case for using transformations, although I don't think that it can be implemented in the T language easily. Would it be possible to add an API to an XSLT processor, and write the transformation as an XSLT (this would be a good thing to do in general)? An alternative approach would be to select a few cells in a row or in a column, and then merge them explicitly. The big requirement would be a way of selecting a column of table cells, which requires a different selection mechanism (a visual method rather than a "logical" method based on the underlying structure). Whether that should be done via a toggle, like browse/edit mode, or should be a different selection method (shift-alt-arrow, or right-mouse-drag...) is an open question that I think is interesting. I think it would be a mistake to force selection of table items to be visual instead of structural - this would go against the existing interface conventions of amaya. But imlementing this visual mode only for tables at first would seem ok. cheers Charles On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Michael Smith wrote: Request for enhancement: Ability to create rowspans and colspans graphically. The ability in Amaya to create and edit tables graphically is an important and powerful feature. AFAIK, it's the only open-source HTML editor that provides this capability. It'd be even grander if Amaya enabled you to graphically create rowspans and colspans. For example, you'd highlight a cell, choose a menu command like "Span [or Merge] Cell to left|right|above|below" or "Split Cell into rows|columns", and Amaya would generate the rowspan and colspan attributes and re-render the table. (Tak Ota's table.el[1]-- an ASCII table editor for Emacs -- lets you create spans that way, and then generate HTML, CALS, TEI, and Latex source.) Or you'd highlight two cells and then choose a menu command like "Span [or Merge] Cells" to merge the two cells into one. I'm not too familiar with current commercial HTML editing tools, but epcEdit, XMetaL, and Arbortext Epic are three XML editors I know that provide the ability to graphically edit tables. (I think Morphon may have added some table capabilities in its latest beta release, but I haven't tried the new version yet, so don't know.) So it'd be great to have a similar feature in Amaya. Regards, --Michael Smith [1] http://table.sourceforge.net/ -- Charles McCathieNevile http://www.w3.org/People/Charles phone: +61 409 134 136 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI fax: +1 617 258 5999 Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia (or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)
Received on Thursday, 6 December 2001 09:00:42 UTC