DOCBOOK-APPS: <spanspec> processing, OASIS Exchange table model

[Michael Smith <smith@xml-doc.org>]

Holger Rauch <Holger.Rauch@heitec.de> writes:

> On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Michael Smith wrote:
> 
> [...]
> > And the OASIS Exchange table model -- which I think will be the
> > default in DocBook 5.0 -- doesn't allow <spanspec> at all, but
> > requires you to specify horizontal spans on <entry>'s.
> 
> Do you have any info whether there will be other changes aside from
> the one you mentioned in the OASIS Exchange table model? If so, what
> will they be?

See OASIS Technical Memorandum TR 9901:1999 --

  http://www.oasis-open.org/html/tm9901.htm

Other than not allowing <spanspec>, maybe the other biggest
differences are that it doesn't allow <entrytbl> or <tfoot> either.

> > Whether or not existing processing apps deal any better with spans
> > specified on <entry>'s instead of <spanspec>'s is another question.
> 
> Do you have any info on that?

For one thing (can't remember if it's already been mentioned in this
thread), the XSL stylesheets don't support <spanspec> at all.

Other than that, I can't say much about it because I always specify
spans on <entry>'s instead. I did very limited testing with <spanspec>
when helping to test CALS table generation in Tak Ota's table.el [1],
and found that horizontal spans always seemed to work fine with the
DSSSL stylesheets whether specified with <spanspec> or on <entry>'s.

[1] http://table.sourceforge.net/