Re: lynx-dev lynx and tables, looking for more information...

[Vlad Harchev]

On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, Jim Barbour wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I just went through and read the lynx-dev archives I could find
> talking about table support in lynx.  What I came away with was...
> 
> o Lynx does not have "true" table support
> 
> o Some modificiations have been made to lynx to allow it to support
>   some kinds of tables.
> 
> I'm wondering if someone can expand on this for me?  What are the
> limitations on which tables lynx will display, and which it will not?

1)  If, for each row, total width of all cells in a row is less than screen
width (without wrapping contents of the cells), then table is rendered
in a usual (for human) tabular form.
2)  If some cell has forced line break (ie <p> or <br>) that cell will be
displayed in several lines, and the rest of table will be displayed depending
on the 1).

 Otherwise, table is rendered as html with html table markup stripped (ie 
 as if all <td> and <tr> were removed) - ie such thing is very difficult
 to read.
 

 File /docs/README.TRST contains a detailed info on this.

> Are there things I can do to customize table display results?

  No (unless you preprocess the html using some script that simplifies table 
structure).

> I'm also interested in hearing more about the problem from a
> developer's standpoint and what the issues are with solving it.

  The lack of time, complexity of the internal lynx structures used for
representing html (in few words, it's just a rendered text and nothing more, 
it's rendered on the fly as html comes from the net), and deep
internationalization - the wide use of unicode and various CJK encodings - and
the fact that international symbols (in the wrong case) are stored as
multibyte (= variable length) characters. Also current code assumes that 
hyperlinks are ordered sequentually ie, the following is supported:

LINK1 LINK2BEGIN|
LINK2END LINK3  |
LINK4           |

 But the following is not (ie tabular link placement):

LINK1BEGIN  LINK2BEGIN  
LINK1END    LINK2END


 Best regards,
  -Vlad