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Subject:RE: Semantic markup for NUANCED tabular data From:Mailing List <mlist -at- ca -dot- safenet-inc -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 21 May 2004 13:56:07 -0400
(Sorry, I modified the Subject line.)
Bill Lawrence offered:
> > But, I can no longer publish the old-style table? Release
> > Notes and compatibility listings can no longer be PDFs
> > or printed docs? I suppose that's acceptable. Except,
> > I have to get that app developed before I even begin to
> > convert the data, because once I stop being able to
> > publish my old, readable table, I have to have the working
> > replacement ready to go.
> Whoa. You're getting way off the mark here. Of course you can still
> have tables and Release Notes and compatibility lists can be
> PDFs. The
> point is, that they can be rendered other ways as well.
What I'm trying to get at is... in general... what would
the markup have to look like such that it COULD be rendered
automatically into the table format, with the option to get
it into any other output form, as necessary?
Right now, in (say) FM, I've got a whole bunch of little
paragraphs, tagged in such a way that FM makes a table.
But that tagging gives little more than formatting info,
and the physical order in which the paragraphs are encountered
is critical to where/how they appear in the table.
Presumably, semantic-only markup would have to have enough
info to differentiate... what? My first thought is that
most of the paragraphs would no longer exist. The actual text
might need to be different, and then it would need to be
packed with meta-data, in order to have an application
generate all the rows of cells with appropriate words or
symbols at each cell.
This would be the same data that would we transparently
interpretable as some other output.
I'm on the outside, peeking in. The glass is foggy or
dirty. The view is distorted.... :-)
But my impression is that, instead of taking five minutes
to assemble a table, I'd have to spend several days trying
to simultaneously create the markup and code the application
that would be able to construct the table... which is how
I'd know what the markup would need to be. I guess...
maybe... sorta...
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