Subject: Re: Draft table spec
From: Jeffry Smith (smith@missioncriticallinux.com)
Date: Wed Jan 17 2001 - 10:50:54 CST
Leonard Rosenthol <leonardr@lazerware.com said:
> First, let me say that I'm glad someone is starting to look at this -
> so don't take my comments below as a "turn off" - just trying to
> spark discussion...
Not a turnoff, but what I was hoping to happen.
>
> At 5:43 PM -0500 1/16/01, Jeffry Smith wrote:
> >Main differences from XHTML:
> >1. all of the various things measured in pixels/percent (border, width, etc)
> >now have a new element, units. This is the measurement for the item (mm,
> >inches, pixels, etc).
>
> Why? The standard CSS way to define measurements is to
> include the units as part of the value (2in, 3mm, 10px, etc.). Is
> there a good reason to break from the standard on this one?
The CSS stuff I've seen (admittedly the HTML stuff) all is just pixels and
percentages. My feeling is that breaking them up is easier to parse - you
know what is the unit and what is the measurement. Of course, I come from a
database perspective, where you don't embed knowledge in the layout. Also, I
think it would be easier to add additional measurements, since you should only
have to create new code to handle the new unit measurement.
>
>
> >2. Added width & height elements to cells. This allows cells to be
> >non-standard sizes.
>
> The problem with that is that if you have a fixed sized cell
> and the text can't fit into it - what happens? I've never found a
> good use for fixed size cells, but I'm open for criticism on this one.
I've not really like them, but this is based on some comments I saw earlier on
the list asking how to handle it, so I included this proposal.
>
>
> >3. Added a REPEAT element to colgroups, thead, and tbody. This is a binary
> >element that indicates whether the element is repeated across pages or not
> >("0" means don't repeat, "1" means repeat).
>
> First, I'm unclear why this is an element and not an
> attribute. Second, why use numbers instead of text. Remember that
> XML is supposed to be human readable and a 1 or 0 wouldn't mean
> anything to a human reading the document.
Wrong statement on my part. It's actually in the attribute lists. It's
supposed to be a part of the tag. The 1 or 0 was to enable it to be easier
for internationalization - 1 or 0 is probably that in any language, and
Abiword menu would be the only thing that has to change. Again, I'm open on
this.
jeff
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