On 8 Mar 2007, at 16:37:15, Thierry Koblentz wrote:
Paul Novitski wrote:
Pairs, triplets... the number of columns doesn't matter. For me a
table is a dataset naturally structured in rows and columns -- in
which everything in each column belongs to one class of data and
everything in each row is one associated group. In your example, the
two columns appear to be Position and Name. It's the fact that
everything in the first column belongs to the class of Positions and
everything in the second column belongs to the class of Names that's
my clue that this is a regular dataset, and therefore a likely
candidate for table markup in HTML.
But this definition applies to more than just table elements,
isn't? In the
above, we could replace the words "first column" with "dt" and "second
column" with "dd" and it would make as much sense...
On the other hand, I personally believe that the use of a dl in this
example would make no *semantic* sense. After all, given the term
"President", the definition of that term would be something like "The
individual in charge of the organisation". "John Smith" simply cannot
be seen as a *definition* of the term "President", but is rather the
personal name of that entity which is *denoted* by the term "President".
If it was called a "denotation list", then fair enough; but it's a
definition list, for grouping terms with their definitions (whatever
vague examples may be given in the standard).
In the example you aren't defining any terms: you are specifying that
a key is bound to a value, and *that* is what a table may usefully be
used for.
Note also that all the elements and attributes of the HTML table
model that promote accessibility (summary, caption, axis, headers,
scope, abbr) are absent when a list of some kind is used. Still, I've
never come across anybody other than myself who uses them anyway :-(
Regards,
Nick.
--
Nick Fitzsimons
http://www.nickfitz.co.uk/
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