Re: lynx-dev Tables in Lynx

[Philip Webb]

990614 Rob Partington wrote: 
> this morning I had a flash of intuition about a nice way of handling tables.
> 20 minutes later, I had my first formatted table displaying on the screen.
> -- nice'n'neat example snipped --
>> if any advanced table formatting algorithms make it into Lynx,
>> to please also allow the user to turn it off.
> That was in my plans from the start. it's now a fundamental requirement.
> There is also the point the table renderer above isn't going
> to be able to handle "complex" tables any time soon,
> there's little point enabling it for anything but the simplest tables.

but those are the ones which are most frustrating to have Lynx miss now!

what's needed is a simple device which would show a line on-screen:

 *** Start of table: <a href=something>attempt 2-dimensional format?</a> ***
 [table shown as at present]
 *** End of table ***
 
if you followed the link, Lynx would create a new separate document
offering its best attempt at formatting the table as a 2-D array.
it would be upto the user whether s/he found the result useful:
i would certainly find it useful for the kind of simple tables
eg of national demographic/financial data in Wash Post or Financial Times
which Lynx mangles badly at present.

this would parallel the treatment of frames
& could be switched off in  lynx.cfg  by those who never want to use it.

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