Subject: Re: Draft table spec
From: Jeffry Smith (smith@missioncriticallinux.com)
Date: Thu Jan 18 2001 - 14:31:14 CST
Leonard Rosenthol said:
> At 8:39 AM -0500 1/18/01, Jeffry Smith wrote:
> >I'm a little lost here. I thought a section was like a <div> in HTML.
> >Example: I have a part of a document that contains a bunch of wide tables,
> >some images, and footnotes. I decide to print that part in landscape mode,
> >with the rest of the document in portrait. That section would be a <section>.
>
> The example is more accurate than the HTML comparison, but
> yes. A section is an area of a document that uses a different layout
> (number of columns, page size, etc.) than previous/following sections.
Hm. Don't see how a table necessarily fits into this. Especially as we
implement things like floating tables (or floating frames, the bottom part of
my proposal), that allow the renderer to shift things around within
constraints to fit the final document.
>
>
> > Can sections nest?
>
> I don't know about the current implementation, but I believe
> that they should be able to, yes. Example, you start a section for
> landscape mode, then inside of that is a section with a column change.
If a table is a section, it will need to be able to nest. This may be getting
into too much overloading of section. I'll start examining the code.
>
>
> >In terms of what's in a cell (<td></td> wrapper), I believe as I proposed, it
> >should be anything you want, including another document (don't know why you
> >would want to, but I believe we don't want to constrain the actual contents of
> >a cell).
>
> You couldn't have a full document, since there can only be
> one <abiword> (root) tag in a document and you shouldn't be able to
> have sectional changes in a cell (ie. columns, page size change).
>
Well, if I have a table within the table (yes, I've seen it done a lot), you
could change the columns of the inserted table, so maybe not a full document,
but some level of nesting.
On that note though, has anyone started thinking about master documents? I'm
referring to the ability to define a master document, consisting of several
sub-documents. The best example is a book of chapters, each of which is
another document. Think collaborative writing (I used to do this a lot with
WP back in the DOS days).
jeff
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