LYNX-DEV Lynx changed handling of TABLEs

[Alan J. Flavell]

(I'm not subscribed to this list, so I would appreciate a cc: of
any responses, thanks)

My attention was drawn belatedly to a mail from Fote on this list:

     Subject: LYNX-DEV fotemods.zip update 
     From: Foteos Macrides <address@hidden> 
     Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 17:43:48 -0500 (EST) 

about changes in the handling of TABLE.

A consequence is that a long-standing trick, TABLE in PRE, no longer
works (nor does PRE in TABLE).

Well, this _was_ a trick, and so one cannot expect too much, but
I'm sorry to see this go.  Some readers might be familiar with my
page where this trick, and others, is discussed:

http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/tablejob.html

And this trick was intended precisely for the situation where
TABLE was doing its intended job, of presenting tabular material,
rather than being misused as a mere page layout tool.

It worked not only with Lynx (over many versions) but also with
several lightweight browsers that pre-dated TABLE support.

Others have mentioned before that Lynx respects the <TAB> markup, and this
can be used to simulate tables (as I also mention in my discussion); but
this is of no benefit to any other "non-table" browsers, which is a pity. 

Another option that is described at
http://www.eff.org/~mech/Scritti/html_table_design.html 
is to stuff the table cells with no-break spaces;  I haven't tried this
intensively myself, but I'd expect it to risk deleterious effects with
table-supporting browsers.

Apart from that we seem to be left with:

1- offer separate TABLE and PRE versions (fully legal HTML, but
awkward for readers).
2- use <TAB> for Lynx, and forget the other non-table browsers
3- use TABLE/PRE for older browsers and Lynxes, and write-off
the latest Lynx

None are particularly attractive, I must say.

(What I call "modified table markup" in my discussion is already done
automatically by Lynx, so it needs no further discussion here). 

On the other hand, the lack of tables support _can_ be a positive
benefit with Lynx when misguided authors are using them to impose
a layout.  emacs-w3 is a text browser that does support tables, and
for tabular data it works well, but for layout stunts I often find
that Lynx gets better results by ignoring the table markup.

all the best
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