Re: Soap re: Possible Tidy improvements

> form should be a container for the table in question.  I'd agree with you  
> that rules for forms can be pretty strange, but you just have to get used  
> to them a little.

But you will normally only fall foul of them if you are abusing structural
markup for layout.  The fix for that in the HTML world is with better
style sheet languages, which can describe the mapping of the logical
structure onto the desired physical layout.  There is a possible case
for having a grid-layout[1] feature explicit in something like CSS, but part
of the problem has been poor implementations, and poor authoring tools,
which are outside the scope of W3C specifications.  The other part of
the problem is that most graphic designers behave as though they cannot
see the structure of their own content.

(Tagged PDF takes the opposite approach to this conflict of structure
and layout, by making the layout the dominant form, and then providing
a sort of "structure sheet", to assign layout components to the logical
structure, with some short cuts where the two structures match.)

[1] Caution: in "web" application terminology, grid tends to refer to
something closer to a structural table, but with various behavioural 
connotations that make it look like typical GUI spreadsheets layouts.

Received on Sunday, 15 February 2004 06:15:59 UTC