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Subject: DOCBOOK: Towards a semantic table-model
I have a number of concerns with the CALS and HTML table models, the biggest problem being IMHO that it is really layout-oriented. This causes major headaches when you have to maintain big tables. Think for example of a table with row and/or columns grouped by categories, such as they appear as nested rows and columns. You have to remember, each time you add/delete/move one row, to adjust the morerows attributes, and other such tedious tasks which just show the limits of this table model. I have started a couple of months ago to design a table model that would address those problems. It currently only features nested rows, and an extension mechanism that makes it possible to annotate row titles, and I wrote a dsssl stylesheet to render into CALS. Note that the DTD is an XML one, and that I did not try to replicate all CALS features, I just implemented the ones I needed at the time. An example document, showing a 3-level nested rows table in a docbook article is included. I still have a number of ideas, among which: - <rowlevelspec>s to hold rowlevel's optional title and to allow <row rowlevel="name"> - nested <column>s - anonymous (title-less rows and cols) - no <entry morerows="..."> (use anonymous rows instead) - no <thead> (too much layout oriented, use column titles instead) - no <spanspec> (too much layout oriented, use nested (and maybe anonymous) columns instead) - annotations on row/column titles However I did not work on this since several months, so I figured out it would be better to release it to the world, in those days where table models are discussed on this list. -- Yann Dirson <Yann.Dirson@fr.alcove.com> http://www.alcove.com/ Technical support manager Responsable de l'assistance technique Senior Free-Software Consultant Consultant senior en Logiciels Libres Debian developer (dirson@debian.org) Développeur Debian
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