of course Paul suggests this because it's the current CALS design, not
the best of all possible designs.
[...]
| |Given, that the philosophy of HTML is to keep it simple, and that
and let me point out that simplicity is not the only desideratum;
useability is another, and as has been pointed out, there are CALS
tools aplenty.
[ ... ]
Bert:
| I agree with Dave here:
|
| - TGROUP and TBODY seem rather redundant. If tables are related, we
| can always put <DIV>..</DIV> around them.
DIV will be uselessly overloaded very quickly. There *is* more
redundancy in the CALS design. Actually, I would want THEAD in
there too, and it could be made doubly omissible, too.
| - Dave's COLSPEC is both more compact and easier readable.
but not by much; I'll take isomorphism with an established model over
this degree of more-compactness.
| - It is useful to distinguish between TH and TD (and easier for the
| style sheet writer).
Absolutely. That's why I'd want THEAD.
[ ...]
| - Using a CLASS attribute to mark a row as header/footer seems
| better than introducing new elements; it simplifies the parser but
| still allows a style sheet to render the row differently.
But once you introduce CLASS, there *will* be usage so widely
varying that you'll never get interoperability out of it. If
you ever want THEAD now's the time to introduce the necessary
structure at the element definition level.
-- Terry Allen (terry@ora.com) O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Editor, Digital Media Group 101 Morris St. Sebastopol, Calif., 95472 occasional column at: http://gnn.com/meta/imedia/webworks/allen/A Davenport Group sponsor. For information on the Davenport Group see ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/davenport/README.html or http://www.ora.com/davenport/README.html