Re: Styling table columns--why so limited?

On 4/5/04 11:18 AM, "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Tantek [ISO-8859-1] ?lik wrote:
>> 
>> I think there can be many examples where the table-ness of elements (i.e.
>> their table semantics) MUST be determined by the language (e.g. say you were
>> marking up a sparse matrix -- the mathematical kind), and thus it would be
>> possible to create pseudo-classes that selected the semantic table-ness of
>> those elements rather than their presentational table-ness.
> 
> Yeah, that might make sense. It would mean that :column(3) would select
> cells in the third column in the markup, as opposed to in the rendering,
> but I expect that's probably ok.
> 
> It would mean that not-over-the-wire scenarios where UAs do not have
> knowledge of the language being used are disadvantaged, but that's not a
> big problem. (Over-the-wire scenarios don't have this problem since you
> should never send unknown languages over the wire.)

It would be no different than the various UI related selectors which require
the UA to have knowledge of the form-ness of elements defined in the
language being used, and certainly we've already agreed that this is not a
problem (e.g. Selectors CR, CSS3 UI (CR soon)).

A good place to start (to define table related pseudo-classes) may be to
understand how matrices are marked up in MathML, and how the table-ness
defined there in syncs up with the semantic tables in XHTML.  Pseudo-classes
could certainly be defined based on a model that would handle those two
semantic languages to begin with.

Tantek

Received on Monday, 5 April 2004 15:03:52 UTC