Re: TABLE in PRE, why not?

On Wed, 24 Sep 1997, Jukka Korpela wrote:

> 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.

I have tried in the latest draft to show how tables can be
browsed aurally using the axis and axes attributes. Basically
axes is used to specify which headers are relevant to each cell
while axis is used to group headers. This allows you to treat
the table as a hierarchy, completely independent of its visual
layout. For more information see:

 http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40/struct/tables.html#h-12.1.6.1

For really rich ways of relating tables to database queries
my studies suggest a 4GL style report-generator script is
appropriate. I can give more details if anyone is interested.
 
Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2521 (office) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Wednesday, 24 September 1997 15:00:32 UTC