- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2005 21:01:50 +0100 (BST)
- To: www-html@w3.org
> How is a UA supposed to determine if two identical string values (like > names) are in fact the same semantic value? Wouldn't it be better if > there was a mechanism that allowed table cells to identify their > semantic value independant of their display value? In case anyone missed the point, this is based on a proposal, in another thread, to abolish rowspan and colspan. I would say a fundamental reason for not abolishing them is that HTML is a markup language, i.e. it takes the plain text of a document and adds additional structural clues, not a relational data format. Also, because it is a document format, not a database GUI interface language, many documents will not contain unique codes for each logically distinct value, so the author would have to assign arbitrary codes in order to make the associations between logically equivalent cells. There is also the issue that domains overlap, so codes would have to encode the domain, which they would not have to do in the database itself, for database derived tables.
Received on Monday, 4 July 2005 21:37:54 UTC