Hi Microformatters, Our research group has been building several wiki- and blog-based tools for which microformat support would be a great fit. While looking at how we might integrate it, we came upon a suggestion for how microformats might incorporate a cleaner representation when used with tables.
The fact that the <COL /> element of a table doesn't actually contain anything makes it impossible (under the current rules) to stash meaningful information there from the microformat perspective. This means that we can put structured information across each row of a table, but not down the columns, leaving us to repeat microformat annotations across each row. Here is an example: <TABLE> <TR><TH>Name</TH><TH>Title</TH></TR> <TR class="vcard"><TD class="fn">Thomas Jefferson</TD><TD class="title">President</TD></TR> <TR class="vcard"><TD class="fn">John Adams</TD><TD class="title">President</TD></TR> </TABLE> What if instead, when parsing the DOM to extract structured information, whenever a <TD> element is encountered, the corresponding <COL> element is treated as if it were the DOM parent of the <TR> element for that cell. This would allow us to stash information both on the rows *and* the columns of the table, allowing for a much more compact representation: <TABLE> <COL class="fn" /><COL class="title" /> <TR><TH>First</TH><TH>Last</TH></TR> <TR class="vcard"><TD>Thomas Jefferson</TD><TD>President</TD></TR> <TR class="vcard"><TD>John Adams</TD><TD>President</TD></TR> </TABLE> Let us know what you think. It makes tables fit much more naturally, from our personal aesthetic point of view. As such, it may make it much easier for template writers (think blog themes, Wikipedia Info Boxes, etc) to incorporate into their templates and content. Best, Ted Benson & David Karger MIT CSAIL Haystack http://haystack.csail.mit.edu _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
