Re: Sortable tables

On 8/29/05, Toby A Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, 2005-08-24 at 12:31 +0000, Markus Jonsson wrote:
> > Is sortable tables of data planned for xhtml? You know as in gui
> > applications, where you click on the header and that column sorts?
> 
> There is nothing to stop browser manufacturers implementing this today!
> (and for HTML too)

Actually given the tight intergration of presentation and semantics in
tables via colspan and rowspan this would be nearly impossible to do
correctly all the time. Say someone had a table like so:

<table>
<tr><td>A<td>B<td>C<td>D</tr>
<tr><td>1200<td>1600<td>1900<td>400</tr>
<tr><td>$1,200<td colspan=3>N/A</tr>
</table>

The system wouldn't know if the N/A's across the colspan where there
for show or there because thows columns are intrinsically linked. If
you were to remove colspan and rowspan and replace them with
presentation attributes it could be done. I called for this a little
while back, but it was determined that colspan and rowspan were
fundamental and semantic.

-- 

Orion Adrian

Received on Tuesday, 30 August 2005 12:44:43 UTC