Re: lynx-dev proposal: rendering tables

[Vlad Harchev]

On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, Chuck Martin wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 26, 1999 at 11:25:38PM +0500, Vlad Harchev wrote:
> > 
> >  IMO rendering tables can be greatly imporved with a cheap trick - we can
> > render each cell of the table in separate line, but with different 
> > identation 
> > for each column. Of course, it will take more lines to render the same 
> > table, but will be much more readable. 
> 
> I just thought of some other potential problems with this approach.
> What if the contents of a cell are centered, or worse, right justified.
> This would make the indentation difficult to see and interpret.  Maybe
> a variation of the numbered list would work.

 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.
 
> >  Consider:
> >  
> > A1-suffix B1 C1
> > some-prefix-A2 B2-some-suffix C2
> > 
> >  vs
> >  
> > A1 -suffix 
> >              B1
> >                          C1
> > some-prefix-A2
> >              B2-some-suffix
> >                          C2
> 
> I'm not sure what "some-suffix" and "some-prefix" mean, but I'd prefer
> less indentation.  How about something like this (the "A1:", etc, and
> the "-----..." lines are literal):

 'some-suffix' and 'some-prefix' can be any words. 
  As for identation, identation you suggest is more conservative. As for me, I
  prefer more identation - this helps table look as table, but in this case we
  can run off the width.

> -----Start of table-----
> 
> A1: Contents if row 1, column A
>     Second line of row 1, column A
 
  What 'Second line of row 1, column A' means - do you mean it should be added 
 by lynx or it was supposed as cell content?
  May be verbose '----.*' are  not needed (think of nested table - what lynx
should emit) - and as I understand lynx should start numerating cells of nested 
table from 'A1'? Think of nested tables: it will emit something like

 A1:data of A1
     B1: -------start of table-------
     A1: data of A1 
     
         B1: data of B1
         
              C1: data of C1
              
     A1: data of A1 
     
         B1: data of B1
         
              C1: data of B3
              
     A2: data of A2
     
         B2: data of B2
         
              C2: data of C2
     -----end of table          

 IMO user can understand that if there is a cell A1 in cell A1, then this is
 a nested table.
   If we mark cell content with tags like 'A1', IMO we can do more identation 
 to imporve readablity of lynx.   
 If table has more columns that screen width can provide, we just place all
 cells of those columns at constant offser from the right edge, like
 
 
 A1: data of A1                        |
        B1: data of B1                 |
                 C1: data of C1        |
                   D1: data of D1 that |
                       was wrapped     |
                   E1: data of E1      |
                   F1: data of F1      |
 A2: data of A2                        |
        B2: data of B2                 |
                 C2: data of C2        | 
                   D2: data of D2 that |
                       was wrapped     |
                   E2: data of E2      |
                   F2: data of F2      |  
                   
 Note the way cell data was wrapped in D1.
 One thing we have to think about is how to be with ROWSPAN and COLSPAN
 (should we recompute mark values?)         

>   B1: Contents of row 1, column B
> 
>     C1: Contents of row 1, column C
> 
> A2: First cell in second row
> 
>   B2: Second cell in second row
> 
>     C2: And on and on like this
> 
> -----End of table-----
> 
> Of course, the style-determined indentations would have to be added to
> the table-cell-determined indentations to keep the intended layout of
> each cell intact.  Any comments?
> 
> Chuck
> 

 Best regards,
  -Vlad