Re: [office] Recommendation to deprecate the is-subtable attribute

[Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Hi,

I have just noticed that my mail was confusing:

First, I wrote:

 > What I'm wondering is whether we should
 > deprecate the attribute in general, or whether we should only deprecate
 > the use of this attribute for the purpose of merging cells.

Later on, I wrote:

 > What the attribute does is to visually merge nested tables into the
 > surrounding table. If we consider this to be a reasonable feature, then
 > we should only deprecate the use of this feature to represent merged
 > cells. If we think no one ever needs this feature, then we may deprecate
 > it in general. I actually have a slight preference for the first option,

That means, I have changed the order of option:-(

So, my preference is to deprecate the feature only to represent merged 
cells, too.

Michael

David A. Wheeler wrote:
> Michael Brauer:
>> my understanding of the request is that the use of the is-subtable 
>> attribute defined in section 8.2.6 should be deprecated, but not sub 
>> tables in general.
>>
>> The reason is that, if this attribute is used in combination with 
>> sub-tables to represent merged cells, that these tables are not accessible.
>>
>> I do understand that argument, and therefore support the request to 
>> deprecate the attribute. What I'm wondering is whether we should 
>> deprecate the attribute in general, or whether we should only deprecate 
>> the use of this attribute for the purpose of merging cells.
> 
> I recommend #2.
> 
> I believe this attribute should be "deprecated" only in the sense that it should not be used to merge cells when spanning was intended instead.  But it should NOT be truly deprecated (option #1), because having a table merge into a larger table is semantically different, and it's a useful sementic differentiation to make.  The problem is not that the concept (fully merged subtables) is useless; the problem is overuse of one construct (subtables with hidden borders) when spanning was intended instead.
> 
> --- David A. Wheeler


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Michael Brauer, Technical Architect Software Engineering
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