Re: Draft HTML 3.0 DTD

Tom Magliery (mag@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Wed, 30 Nov 1994 18:18:12 -0600


>o I'd like to put in a bid for disallowing nested tables, and I also question
> the need for vertical alignment in a table cell. Yeah, you can probably think
> of cases where someone could use them, but are they really all that useful?
>
> I'll be perfectly honest and admit that my main concern here is the
> complexity of implementing these features in a browser. Implementing tables
> according to to the HTML+ specification was enough of a headache, having to
> handle vertical alignment and nested tables would be an order of magnitude
> more difficult. What ever happened to Keep It Simple?

Well, that depends on your implementation, I'd think. Our implementation
of tables is practically identical to that of the HTML 3.0 draft (excepting
a couple of attributes which will be very simple additions), and it allows
for nested tables. (I'm speaking of the Windows client specifically here,
I'm not sure of the status of Mac and X, but I know that the capability
will be in there eventually as well.) We didn't do it because we knew it
would be in the 3.0 draft, nor because we thought of any particular
examples that made it useful, but rather because (according to the person
writing the code) it was extremely simple to allow, so why not?

By the way, I don't know of any spiffy examples for the applicability of
VALIGN, but this is another case where Carl (the aforementioned programmer)
said "Sure, that'll be easy". That's one of the few additions necessary
for us to come up to the full 3.0 tables spec. Carl says he will probably
be able to finish that one tonight.

>o I'd suggest that perhaps DINGBAT might be a better attribute name than
> BULLET, since the meaning of "bullet" is "a small ball" whereas "dingbat" is
> a printer's term for funny characters such as those used to mark items in a
> list.

I think more folks are familiar with the word "bullet" than the word
"dingbat". On a personal level I like "dingbat", though, just because it's
a much cooler word. :-) So I guess I could go either way on this one.

>o What does ALIGN=JUSTIFY do?

I'm guessing that it means the text will be lined up evenly on both left
and right, like in columns of a newspaper article.

mag

--
Tom Magliery ** NCSA ** 605 E Springfield ** Champaign IL 61820 ** USA