RE: Semantic markup for tabular data

[Mailing List <mlist -at- ca -dot- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

Bill Lawrence suggested:

> Most XML editors I've encountered either leave you to fend 
> for yourself
> with the table tagging (which I must confess is a little more 
> than I can
> handle for complex tables) or they provide a table editor.  The table
> editor may be a semi-WYSIWYG environment or simply an editor that
> maintains a visual relationship of rows, columns, and cells.  I find
> that I need some sort of table editor for complex tables.  Within
> Docbook, each row, column, and cell is an XML tag itself, with
> formatting attributes that I can set if I need to actually 
> specify some
> sort of dimension.  Normally I don't set actual dimensions, instead I
> set a percentage width for some columns and allow the 
> publishing scripts
> to figuring out the appropriate formatting for the output medium I've
> selected.
 
> The nice thing about this approach is that I don't have to tweak table
> formatting much, I simply let the formatter do its job.  If 
> the results
> aren't good (and yes, I do check every table) then I'll step 
> in and set
> widths.
 
> I can conditionalize rows, columns, cells, and text tags within cells,
> so I have some fairly complex tables that generate different 
> formatting
> and contents depending on the audience.  

But doesn't that defeat the philosophy of having the data 
totally divorced from formatting? Shouldn't a table be just 
ONE of the ways in which the raw XML data can be massaged 
for output?  If you are forcing into a table at the outset, 
doesn't that constrain re-usability? 

/kevin


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