Re: LYNX-DEV LYNX: please say "THIS IS A TABLE!"

[David Combs]

I disagree.  Most pages that I look at do NOT have tables
of them.  

And I am UNABLE to tell at a glance that something is a
table, from what is displayed on the screen.

Maybe an OPTIONAL "This is a table" would be ok.  Maybe the
inserting of a VERY VISIBLE extra LINE saying that
the START (and at the END) of the table would help.

Like I say: we all have different things we look at on
the web.  The things that I myself look at tend to
NOT use tables, except when really necessary.

(If everything DID have tables, then I couldn't very well
use lynx, could I, as I would be missing most of the info
I needed!)

> From address@hidden Thu Mar 26 00:15:49 1998
> From: David Woolley <address@hidden>
> Subject: Re: LYNX-DEV LYNX: please say "THIS IS A TABLE!"
> 
> >    Viewable with HTML 2.0 - compatible browsers such as [1]Netscape. We
>                    ^^^^^^^^
> 
> This states that you don't need table support to view the page, as does
> the lack of DOCTYPE, although the latter incompatible with the use of
> many of the constructs in the page!
> 
> > 
> > Actually, on doing the \, you see that it is indeed a TABLE --
> > meaning you must instead DOWNLOAD it and display via
> > NETSCRAPE or something -- but no HINT is given of that.
> 
> I don't think any hint is needed; it is pretty obvious by looking at it
> and by considering that nearly every page has tables these days.  The latter
> point, in particular, would mean that any warning by Lynx would mess up the
> dislay even more and would frustrate those trying to do tables in a Lynx
> friendly way.
> 
> Incidentally, if people want an example of text mode tables, they might
> look at the "alternative" mode in the WWW Consortium's Amaya browser.
> Note that this doesn't do any clever column width processing, so headings
> tend to be awkwardly wrapped.  Note that this browser is missing frames.
>