Re: Tables and Charts

Chris Tilbury (C.J.Tilbury@estate.warwick.ac.uk)
Fri, 7 Jul 1995 16:26:02 BST

On 7 Jul 95 at 9:07, www-html@www10.w3.org wrote:

> Perhaps tables could have a few CLASSes with suggested renderings,
> i.e. 2dbar, pie, etc., similar to the <NOTE> element. These CLASSes
> (and any others) of TABLE could, of course, use stylesheets to
> affect the rendering as Chris Tilbury suggested.
>
> How does that sound?
>

Presumably, you mean something along the lines of

<TABLE CLASS="2dpie"> ... </TABLE> ?

The only potential problem with this is that the CLASS attribute, is
by nature fairly undefined - there are no "classes" as such, although
you could certainly suggest them.

Having an arbitrary class to define the "instance" of the table in
question, viz

<TABLE CLASS="FirstTableInThisDocument"> ... </TABLE>
...
<TABLE CLASS="SecondTableInThisDocument"> ... </TABLE>
...
<TABLE CLASS="ThirdTableInThisDocument"> ... </TABLE>

referring to that instance, viz

TABLE.FirstTableInThisDocument : renderstyle.type = 2dbar
TABLE.SecondTableInThisDocument : renderstyle.type = 3dpie
TABLE.ThirdTableInThisDocument : renderstyle.type = scatter

and defining the set of legal values for renderstyle.type, is
probably a safer bet than trying to enforce a list of table "classes"
(since the CLASS attribute only has arbitrary values, not enforced
ones) to all have a certain suggested rendering.

Ciao,

Chris

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