On 04/26/2011 10:51 AM, Allison Randal wrote:
On 04/25/2011 08:09 PM, Karl Williamson wrote:
On 04/23/2011 11:53 PM, David E. Wheeler wrote:
On Apr 23, 2011, at 10:09 PM, Karl Williamson wrote:
I was thinking that PseudoPod implemented most of what might be
needed, and so why not ship that.
Its table spec looks quite simple, and perhaps sufficient.
+1
However, in thinking about this some more, I think we need to be able to
at least specify centered column headings, and spans. This is easily
done with html and tbl.
How about adding some modifiers to the PseudoPod tags, such as:
=row center
=row right
I'm thinking this would mean that the first column in the first row
would be centered, and the first column in the second row would be right
justified, and any other columns would have the default? Is that
correct? Thus for three columns, one could say
=row center left left
=cell span 2
I would think that it would be better to put the span info on the =row
tag because the =cell tag already accepts text after it, and it is
sufficient to put it on the row tag, like this:
=row center left span 2
denotes three columns, with the final 2 merged.
Also, I would think it would be best if =row's that have no modifiers
would inherit the modifiers from the latest =row that does have them. So
=row center left span 2
...
=row
...
=row
has 3 rows each with 3 columns in the same layout.
I'm tempted to not have defaults; the first =row must list each column,
and it would be an error to have a different number of cells than
specified by that =row. (Again, subsequent =row's wouldn't have to list
the modifiers)
I think it must be the case in PseudoPod that there can be a full
paragraph of text after the =cell. Or must everything be on that line?
Is it possible to specify more than one =headrow? I think even simple
tables need to be able to have sub-headings.
Worth thinking through the desired characteristics. It'll have to be a
bit of "least common denominator", since we don't want to give people
the idea that they can build hugely complicated table specifications in
Pod when there's no way to represent them in the various output formats.
For HTML output, I tend to create a stylesheet that does all the fancy
display work on the tables. (The generated HTML pages do a very
tolerable impression of the O'Reilly printed table format.)
We also need to remember LaTeX and DocBook XML as common table output
formats.
Allison
