Subject: Re: support for Tables
From: Karl Ove Hufthammer (huftis@bigfoot.com)
Date: Mon Oct 16 2000 - 14:30:06 CDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Johan Stenfors" <Johan.Stenfors@firstlinux.net>
To: <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
Sent: Monday, October 16, 2000 2:29 PM
Subject: Re: support for Tables
>About the Tables, when the time comes, I believe we should wite a
>specification of the file format/internal format of a table. Then
>definitions for methods (low level) to add/change delete a table
>cell. (A row and a column are several cells, might be done as
>iterative cell operations).
Well, I think we first need to decide *what* we need from an table
implementation, before we decide how the file/internal format should be.
>When this design is done, several implementation/user interaction
>ideas can compeete. Than we can choose the most promising
>implementation, and it would only affect the user interface, the
>internals would be the same.
>
>How about the HTML definition of a table ? Is it too basic to be
>sufficient ?
No, I don't think so, though it is strictly row-based (this may not be a bad
thing when using a WYSIWYG application for editing).
Also, HTML (or rather the XHTML tables module) includes elements for table
headers ('tbody') and footers ('tfoot'). These should be supported. For example,
table headers and footers should be repeated on the top/bottom of each printed
page the table spans (MS Word does this), and should not be sorted when sorting
columns (we'll need a sort feature too for this!).
This is what I mean. We should define what features we want from a table
implementation, like table headers/footers, nice table "styles" (like the
autoformat feature in MS Word), &c. If anybody's interested, I can write up a
simple requirement specification which we can discuss.
>My opinion is that what is important is to design the data format
>for the Tables, the rest is just coding.
Yes.
--#
Karl Ove Hufthammer
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