[css-tables] Research papers on automatic table layout

At the CSS WG meeting, I mentioned some research into different 
algorithms for making more compact, better balanced tables. Here are 
some relevant papers:

Mihai Bilauca, Graeme Gange, Patrick Healy, Kim Marriott, Peter Moulder, 
Peter J. Stuckey (2015) Automatic Minimal-Height
Table Layout. INFORMS Journal on Computing 27(3):449-461. 
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2014.0637
(Comparison of a number of different algorithms that are guaranteed to 
find the optimal solution)

Marriott, K., Moulder, P., and Hurst, N. 2013. HTML automatic table 
layout. ACM Trans. Web 7, 1, Article 4
(March 2013), 27 pages.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2435215.2435219
(Comparison of traditional HTML table layout to a specific constraint-
solving algorithm that is fast and gives consistently better results)

Gange, G., Marriott, K.G., Stuckey, P.J., 2012, Optimal guillotine 
layout, Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, 4 
September 2012 to 7 September 2012, Association for Computing Machinery, 
New York NY USA, pp. 13-22.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2361354.2361359
(For grid layout with fixed-width columns, rather than for tables: A 
method to automatically determine the number of rows and columns that 
each cell should span, to arrive at the most compact layout overall)


One particular implementation of a constraint solving algorithm is 
Cassowary[1], which is available as a polyfill, complete with a syntax 
to try it out from within CSS: http://gridstylesheets.org/

[1] http://constraints.cs.washington.edu/cassowary/



Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
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