Re: For the future - requests for the W3C (fwd)

 From: MegaZone <megazone@livingston.com>
| As for the browsers that indent <P> already, it is an implimentation
| issue.  If they add support for <TAB> then I would drop the indentation
| of <P>.  Or add logic so that <P><TAB> only gets *one* indent, but say
| <P><TAB><TAB> gets two, etc.
| 
| It won't break any existing systems.
| 
| TAB should have more uses than indenting paragraphs.
---

Exactly - TAB for paragraph indentation is definitely a stylesheet
issue, but TAB to indicate that certain elements need to be aligned is
an information issue and should be representable.

On the other hand, as I sit here this morning and think about it, I'm
beginning to be convinced that TABLE is the right mechanism for it.
TABs on typewriters were created to simplify typing tables.  TABLEs are
already designed to convey the information that certain elements are
intended to be vertically aligned.  Why duplicate that?

We could extend the TABLE syntax slightly to make this use easier, by
reducing the need for using COLSPAN and for empty cell tags:

	<TS> is a table cell (like TD or TH) that, wherever it begins,
	spans all remaining columns of the table

	COL=n is an attribute of TH, TD, and TS elements that
	indicates the cell begins in column n; any cells between the
	current column and column n are skipped

So, a code sample might look like (keyword and variable emphasis omitted
for clarity):

<table width="100%" cols=10>
<colgroup span=10>
<tr><ts>	for (i=0; i<SIZE; i++)
<tr><ts col=2>		if (val[i] < THRESHOLD) {
...

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
phone:	217-384-8589			  fax:	217-384-8550
internet mail:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com

Received on Tuesday, 14 May 1996 09:41:21 UTC