Status of Tables in HTML+?

"William M. Perry" <wmperry@banana.ucs.indiana.edu>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Status of Tables in HTML+?
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 1993 08:20:30 -0500
Message-id: <9482.747494430@banana.ucs.indiana.edu>
From: "William M. Perry" <wmperry@banana.ucs.indiana.edu>
Status: RO
Just curious as to what the status of the table is in html+ after the
W^5?

I heard that most people were concerned with it taking two passes to
parse a table.  Although this isn't a hideous problem (I have 
rudimentary table support in my emacs browser), it would be nice not
to have to do it. :)

Has anyone proposed something similar to LaTeX's tabular environment?
This has to have a 'template' at the beginning saying how many columns
there are and how they are justified.  This would solve the problem of
how many columns there are without parsing the thing twice.

I would propose a new attribute for the TBL tag - COLUMNS=#, where #
would be how many columns the table should be formatted as.  <TH> and
<TD> would still have the colspan, rowspan, and align attributes.

Would anyone have any major objections to this?  Alternatives?

-Bill P.