Re: [docbook] CALS/XHTML tables: hard to implement?

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

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/ Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@pinkjuice.com> was heard to say:
|  From browsing various list archives etc I had the impression that
| DocBook's CALS tables are hard to implement (fully and correctly).
|
| Paul, Norm, and/or others:
| Could you summarize your experience?

CALS has an interesting inheritance model for properties, going back
through cells, rows, spanspec, colspec, tbody, and tgroup.

CALS allows cells to be omitted.

Keeping track of omitted cells in the face of cells that span both
horizontally and vertically is tricky.

Column spanning is done with namest and namend, which go back to
colspecs, which may have an implicit column number. So figuring them
out is tricky.

It's a bunch of hard work to implement CALS->HTML correctly.

| Would you say that CALS tables are significantly harder to implement
| than XHTML tables?

Yes, CALS->XHTML is a lot harder than the identity transform of
XHTML->XHTML :-)

| Would you say that they are much harder to implement than they should
| be for what they offer? (same question regarding XHTML tables if you
| have experience)

Oh, I think if I was on a committee designing a table standard, I'd
avoid some of the things that CALS did. But tables are hard.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

- -- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Clearness is so eminently one of
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | the characteristics of truth that
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | often it even passes for truth
                                   | itself.--Joubert
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