Re: Topic: Tables and 1.0


Subject: Re: Topic: Tables and 1.0
From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Fri May 04 2001 - 08:43:32 CDT


At 05:24 PM 5/2/2001 +1000, Martin Sevior wrote:
>Anyway Eric I would appreciate your feedback on what seems to us to be the
>hardest part of doing tables right, that is page layout.

         Actually, in many ways the layout issues are easier than others -
DEPENDING on your goals and/or implementation for tables. A larger issue
that you need to decide BEFORE anything else is how much (if any) support
you are going to provide for cross cell and/or cross table selection (ie.
can the user select part of one cell and part of another, or select some
text outside a table and some inside). If the answer is that every cell is
self-contained - then tables aren't very difficult as you can treat them as
separate containers (as you suggest). HOWEVER, if you plan to allow
cross-cell selection, then the problem is VERY difficult to solve
(well). I explained this to Dom over beer one night..

>Tables know their horizontal dimensions as containts.

         Not necessarily. HTML Tables, for example, allow for best fit,
percentage width (50% of page), and can also allow for fixed height,
dynamic width.

LDR



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat May 26 2001 - 03:51:02 CDT