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Re: lynx-dev proposal: rendering tables
From: |
Vlad Harchev |
Subject: |
Re: lynx-dev proposal: rendering tables |
Date: |
Wed, 28 Apr 1999 15:28:14 +0500 (SAMST) |
On Wed, 28 Apr 1999, Chuck Martin wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 28, 1999 at 06:54:35AM +0500, Vlad Harchev wrote:
> >
> > IMO we shouldn't respect justification of cells - this will make life
> > easier,
> > and will be better visually - offset of a cells will be
> > independant of the aligment. This will help visually scanning cells.
>
> If all tables were really tables, I would agree with you. Howver, the
> vast majority of "tables" are abuses of the TABLE element, intended to
> make web pages "pretty." For example, it's very common to see a "table"
> with some variation of the following format:
>
> -------------------------------------------
> |
> This cell contains a title or maybe |
> a company logo or something, centered |
> in the cell. |
> |
> -------------------------------------------
> | |
> This | This cell contains the main |
> is | body of the page. It contains |
> some | headings, paragraphs, ordered |
> sort | and unordered lists, etc. |
> of | |
> menu | There may even be tables in |
> | this cell. |
> Item1 | |
> | Some of it may even be |
> Item2 | centered or right-justified |
> | Don't even ask me how long it |
> Item3 | took me to create this little |
> | example. :-) |
> Item4 | |
> | The format may be important, |
> Item5 | and in a case like this, I |
> | think the formatting, justifi- |
> Item6 | cation, etc., should be |
> | honored. |
> | |
> -------------------------------------------
Nice example :)
I don't have experience on the average table usage, since I don't browse web
at all. I was thinking about plain tables with 2-4 columns with short string
like category name and 'yes/no' in cells.
If a lot of tables look this way, the following idea should be considered :
Allow treating the cells as frames, and allow going to each cell with a link
(ie the given cell on entire screen) - prehaps we should bind to a
keypress showing a list of links to cells, that have content larger than
configurable threshold (measured in non-white space characters).
Another revolutionary approach - implement piping the html the lynx downloads
through pipe to user-defined program (waiting for some html on it's output).
I don't think it is difficult to implement.
There are several links on Klaus's page that point to scripts that do some
sort of table formatting (as I understand, they render table content to <pre>,
preserving other html markup).
IMO things are too complicated to choose the single approach that will be
satisfacting in all cases - so implementing piping seems very progressive
step. There is an undocumented and unimplemented command - LYK_PIPE already,
( look in LYKeyMap.c ).
>[...]
Best regards,
-Vlad