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


From: Jonathan Sergent
Subject: Re: LYNX-DEV LYNX: please say "THIS IS A TABLE!"
Date: Sat, 28 Mar 1998 01:02:31 -0500

Greg writes:
 ] Hm, I wouldn't want to discourage people from making pages lynx-friendly,
 ] but I think precisely the opposite is really going on.
 ] 
 ] The pages lynx displays reasonably now are the ones that abuse tables to
 ] handle arbitrary positioning. The fact is that html provides no other way to
 ] control display formatting reasonably, and stylesheets are still not useful
 ] for mass audiences.
 ] 
 ] But tables are really only intended for tabular data. It's precisely these
 ] tables where the tabular relationships are significant, that Lynx does the
 ] worst on.

I use <TAB ...> to line things up in my tables so that they look okay in
Lynx.  It's pretty much a Lynx-enhanced thing, but what the heck...
It was in an HTML spec at one point or another IIRC.

I believe some people use &nbsp; to the same effect.  Regardless, there
are various Lynx hacks (I prefer to think of them as Lynx-enhanced 
features :-) that work to make tabular data usable on Lynx without
affecting other browsers at all (since they ignore TAB).

So I'd be pretty annoyed at the proposed mod as it would make it 
impossible to do anything to do the right thing with respect to 
tabular data look right in Lynx as well as other browsers.

 ] Of course ultimately someone will just bite the bullet and implement tables.
 ] When they do they'll have to be careful to add features to keep lynx usable
 ] under a screen reader for blind users.

The problem is that you can't implement tables correctly with only one 
rendering pass.  It might be possible to hack it in somehow, but it makes 
much more sense to just go for the whole thing and redo the parsing engine
to handle such things more elegantly.  For support for things like
scripting and incremental rendering it would be necessary anyhow.  I
hope to graduate in May so I don't want to take something of this size
on... and I'm happy enough with the current handling of things.

The other issue is that in order to do the right thing for some tables
you would need to implement horizontal scrolling since they would exceed
the width of the screen.  In addition to being nontrivial to implement
well, I would expect that it would confuse the heck out of screen 
readers.


-- 
Jonathan Sergent / address@hidden

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