RE: Styling table columns--why so limited?

> From: Ian Hickson [mailto:ian@hixie.ch]
> On Mon, 5 Apr 2004 Matthew.van.Eerde@hbinc.com wrote:
> >
> > Yes, indeed.  Pure CSS, as a tree-only model, allows for only row-level
> > stylings.
> 
> And that is the problem that people want to have solved.
> > If you want to allow simultaneous row- and column-level stylings, you
> > can NOT think of rows and columns as objects - you HAVE to think of them
> > as attributes.
> 
> But they can't be attributes, since you need to know attributes before the
> cascade, and yet you don't know what is in what cell until after the
cascade.
> 

Then there is no solution.  You'll have to relax a requirement or give up
the hunt.
Suggested ways to relax:
1) Allow a two-pass cascade - one for display: to determine what goes where,
and one for everything else.
2) Allow symlinks - something like
<table>
<tc><td id="cell11" /><td id="cell21" /></tc>
<tc><symlink to="cell12"><symlink to="cell22"/></tc>
<tr><symlink to="cell11"><td id="cell12" /></tr>
<tr><symlink to="cell21"><td id="cell22" /></tr>
</table>
This allows styles to be placed on <tr>'s for row-level stylings and on
<tc>'s for column-level stylings.
3) Force the table-ness of things to be determined by the markup language.

I like 3) myself.

Matthew.van.Eerde@hbinc.com                805.964.4554 x902
Hispanic Business Inc./HireDiversity.com   Software Engineer
perl -e"print join er,reverse',','l hack',' P','Just anoth'"

Received on Monday, 5 April 2004 13:34:58 UTC