Re: lynx-dev Table support?

[Dave Eaton]

On Wed, 5 May 1999, Chuck Martin wrote:

> On Wed, May 05, 1999 at 06:50:22AM -0400, Larry W. Virden wrote:
> > 
> > I hope that as people dream up ways for lynx to do tables better
> > they keep in mind speech synthesisers and do not build a table display
> > that makes it more difficult for software to read the table..
> 
> I'm curious.  Could a speech synthesizer make sense out of a table
> that was created with <PRE> instead of <TABLE> and it's associated

The ones that I have seen would not. In fact, often it is hard enough for
_sighted_ folks who aren't adept at matrix presentations to make sense of
space-sparated PRE formatted tables, though I have used them on occasion. 

If the folks on this list haven't considered it already, there is a
relatively new product named iSilo (www.isilo.com) which formats and
displays HTML pages on the Palm Pilot and related devices. Since (like
lynx) that device doesn't lend itself to graphical tables, the author has
implemented them in serial fashion. It does have the "luxury" of using
varying thickness horizontal lines as indicators: Very thick for table
start/stop, medium for row boundaries (except at table boundaries), and
thin for cell boundaries. But something similar should be able to be done
for Lynx with short rows of dots, minus signs, and equals I would think
so that a modified version of the iSilo scheme for lynx could render: 

 +--------------+--------------+
 |  row1 cell1  |  row1 cell2  |
 +--------------+--------------+
 |  row2 cell1  |  row2 cell2  |
 +--------------+--------------+

as something like:

==========
row1 cell1
..........
row1 cell2
----------
row2 cell1
..........
row2 cell2
==========

Also, iSilo handles "COLSPAN" by just showing the cell with no other
indication that it "spans" and "ROWSPAN" by just showing the cell in the
first row on which it would be encountered.

The iSilo logic is not OpenSource, but the approach is pretty clear once
you get use to it and it seems acceptable to me on my Pilot ... it might
work for Lynx and for use with "reader" software.

Regards,
 Dave Eaton
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