Re: lynx-dev proposal: rendering tables

[Vlad Harchev]

On Wed, 28 Apr 1999, Chuck Martin wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 28, 1999 at 06:54:35AM +0500, Vlad Harchev wrote:
> > 
> >  IMO we shouldn't respect justification of cells - this will make life 
> > easier,
> > and will be better visually - offset of a cells will be
> > independant of the aligment. This will help visually scanning cells.
> 
> If all tables were really tables, I would agree with you.  Howver, the
> vast majority of "tables" are abuses of the TABLE element, intended to
> make web pages "pretty."  For example, it's very common to see a "table"
> with some variation of the following format:
> 
> -------------------------------------------
>                                           |
>    This cell contains a title or maybe    |
>   a company logo or something, centered   |
>               in the cell.                |
>                                           |
> -------------------------------------------
>          |                                |
>   This   | This cell contains the main    |
>    is    | body of the page.  It contains |
>   some   | headings, paragraphs, ordered  |
>   sort   | and unordered lists, etc.      |
>    of    |                                |
>   menu   | There may even be tables in    |
>          | this cell.                     |
>   Item1  |                                |
>          |         Some of it may even be |
>   Item2  |    centered or right-justified |
>          |  Don't even ask me how long it |
>   Item3  |  took me to create this little |
>          |                   example. :-) |
>   Item4  |                                |
>          | The format may be important,   |
>   Item5  | and in a case like this, I     |
>          | think the formatting, justifi- |
>   Item6  | cation, etc., should be        |
>          | honored.                       |
>          |                                |
> -------------------------------------------
 Nice example :)

 I don't have experience on the average table usage, since I don't browse web
at all. I was thinking about plain tables with 2-4 columns with short string
like category name and  'yes/no' in cells.
 If a lot of tables look this way, the following idea should be considered :
 Allow treating the cells as frames, and allow going to each cell with a link 
 (ie the given cell on entire screen) - prehaps we should bind to a
keypress showing a list of links to cells, that have content larger than
configurable threshold (measured in non-white space characters).

 Another revolutionary approach - implement piping the html the lynx downloads
through pipe to user-defined program (waiting for some html on it's output).
I don't think it is difficult to implement.
 There are several links on Klaus's page that point to scripts that do some
sort of table formatting (as I understand, they render table content to <pre>,
preserving other html markup).
 IMO things are too complicated to choose the single approach that will be
satisfacting in all cases - so implementing piping seems very progressive
step. There is an undocumented and unimplemented command - LYK_PIPE already,
( look in LYKeyMap.c ).

>[...]
  
 Best regards,
 -Vlad