Re: THEAD & TFOOT for columns

On Mon, 18 Aug 1997, Neil St.Laurent wrote:

> > How about defining a technique for describing all sides of a table?
> > Something in which there could be left, right, top, and bottom elements
> > that could be defined.  I don't know if COLFOOT would really solve this or
> > not, since a column head seems to simply be a subset of the table head,
> > rather than an element to define a left "header" or right "footer"..
> 
> I think that is just a matter of naming.
> THEAD = TOP
> TFOOT = BOTTOM
> COLHEAD = LEFT
> COLFOOT = RIGHT
> 
> Those would all be fixed areas. 

There are several things I would like to add here.

First, scrolling horizontally can make a lot of sense for languages
written vertically, for example Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and in
particular Mongolian.

Second, to a considerable extent (in particular for Chinese/Japanese/
Korean), the writing direction is a style issue. It's probably
best to make it a style issue and nothing else. This is in contrast
to the writing sequence within a single line (bidirectionality), for
which some of it has to be part of text semantics. In this sense,
the names HEAD/FOOT are good because they don't preclude placement.
In a vertically written Chinese document which decided to also have
the table vertically presented (it's not compulsory, for certain
reasons, the table could be left horizontal), THEAD would be
right (because in Chinese, the columns go right-to-left) and
TFOOT would be left.

Third, I think that for generality, and in particular for
spreadsheets, it's good to have COLHEAD/COLFOOT.

Regards,	Martin.

Received on Monday, 18 August 1997 08:22:54 UTC