TABLE in PRE, why not?

Would it be a bad idea to have
	(TABLE | (%inline;)*)
instead of just (%inline;)* as the content of PRE? This would
allow authors with not too complicated or too big tables to
have just one page for all kinds of browsers by carefully(!)
adding the necessary number of spaces in the table cells:
table-capable browsers should just render the table normally,
possibly even ignoring the PRE and using proportional fonts
for better results [1], while ones that ignore the table
markup still know how to deal with PRE and therefore display
the content with all spaces and line breaks, delivering a
decent layout.

I'm using this method on one of my pages for an example, so
see yourself what I have in mind:
	http://www.ph-cip.uni-koeln.de/~wahlen/music/top10.html
Looks okay on all browsers I've used to look at it so far; if
there are any problems with other ones, I'd like to know.

Holger


[1] Apparently that's the behavior of most current browsers
already - see
	http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/tablejob.html
for more information.

____  |__|   / Holger   //       mailto:wahlen@ph-cip.uni-koeln.de  ____
      |  |/|/  Wahlen  //  http://www.ph-cip.uni-koeln.de/~wahlen/

Received on Tuesday, 23 September 1997 12:47:01 UTC