Re: lynx-dev [yet another] note on table rendering

[Chuck Martin]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2000 at 09:12:31AM -0500, Klaus Weide wrote:
> 
> Lynx's Minimal Table Support = treat <TD> as ' ', treat <TR> as <BR>
> (more or less).  That's in general (for "real" tables) much better than
> your minimal proposal.

I would think it would be better to treat <TD> as at least two spaces
(non-collapsible), since there might be several words in each table cell,
and this would make it more clear where the boundaries were.  Maybe even
something like '::' would be better, in case some or all of the table
cells begin or end with a <BR>.

> When tables are used just for positioning and layout, I generally don't
> miss seeing them.  Mostly only if some text mentions something silly like
> "click the blahblah icon to the left" etc.

I agree, and I'd rather lynx would only render real tables, since tables
generally slow things down more than you might realize (I did a comparison
between lynx, links, and w3m on a local copy of a large document that used
tables for formatting, and the times were about 7 seconds for lynx, 21 for
w3m, and 35 for links, if I remember correctly, although there could have
been other reasons besides the tables, since I didn't try to duplicate the
experiment with a large document without tables).  The problem is trying
to get lynx to know which are real tables and which are just table abuses
for formatting purposes.

Chuck