Re: TABLE in PRE, why not?

On Tue, 23 Sep 1997, Holger Wahlen wrote:

> 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

This is an important problem, but I hope we can find a better solution.
Mixing PRE and TABLE is really an ad hoc hack.

I think that both character cell browsing and speech synthesis are
important (and will become more important), and tables should be
presentable in them as far as possible. The way to that should,
however, be logical table markup plus good user agents.

I suppose that any table which could be hand-formatted (for use within
PRE) by an author could be presented equally well (or better) by
a good-quality character cell browser. I somehow like the idea of
computers doing the boring work, although I know it may take some
boring work by programmers to make them do that.

What are the implications on the improvement of the HTML language?
Basically, the table concept should support the specification of
the logical structure of tables, as outlined in my
http://www.hut.fi/home/jkorpela/HTML4.0/comments.html#tables
so that a browser which has great difficulties in formatting tables
could apply a strategy which takes into account only the most crucial
requirements (such as indicating the columns right and adjusting
numerical items in a column right), since e.g. a character cell
browser really hasn't got many tools to play with.

Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/home/jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 24 September 1997 02:00:37 UTC