Bill Lam wrote:
> On the contrary I consider grid characters important because
> information will be lost without them, eg, <1 vs <<1
On the contrary to your contrary, using HTML will allow us to distinguish a
lot more relevant information than our current text-only display can (e.g.
we could have code that makes 1 distinct from ,1 and +/%# distinct from
+/`%`# even in boxed-display mode).
But to address your specific concern about differentiating between <1 and
<<1 , see this example:
http://dan.bron.us/j/j-boxes-as-html-tables.html
You can check the source to see I haven't done anything sneaky. This is
just the natural implementation of nested tables in HTML. Of course you
could override the default style with user stylsheets.
> I'm sceptical box nouns can be actually represented by csv which only
> intended for 2-d cells as such in excel.
Excel can actually display nested tables as well. What it can't do is
display open, multidimensional (2<#...@$) arrays. But that's unrelated to the
display of boxes, and is a general problem for array displays, HTML or not.
> As Eric suggested, if I really wanted a html tag, I would use jhtml
But it's not the HTML tags we want, it's the browser's interpretation of
those HTML tags. That is, I don't want to see
<table><tr><td>1</td></tr></table>
which is what jhtml would display (IIUK).
The short answer is, for a browser platform, HTML tables are the natural and
correct representation for boxed data.
-Dan
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