Chris Johnson wrote: > > Thanks again for the 'collapsed' colspec's for the display of tables - > it has made the editing of my docBook files a *lot* faster (much less > scrolling). > > Since I have been looking at tables a lot lately, I thought it would be > useful / more intuitive to content editors for XXE to *display* the > tables in the following order: > > colspec > thead > tbody > tfooter > > In other words, display the table footer (tfooter) at the _bottom_ of > the table. This seems to me the most intuitive, user-centric way to > display tables: head, body, and finally the footer. > > However, the docBook DTD specifies the following content model for the > informaltable element: > > informaltable ::= > (blockinfo?, > ((textobject*, > (graphic+|mediaobject+|tgroup+))| > ((col*|colgroup*), > thead?,tfoot?, > (tbody+|tr+))))
[[[the above informaltable is a mix between DocBook informaltable and XHTML table. The exact content model is: informaltable ::= (blockinfo?,textobject*, (graphic+|mediaobject+|tgroup+)) tgroup ::= (colspec*,spanspec*,thead?,tfoot?,tbody)]]] > In other words according to the DTD, the document order must be > colspec, thead, tfoot, tbody. Perhaps there is a good reason for this - > (anyone?) - but since the styled display exists to help *humans* edit > XML documents more easily, this human would prefer a more intuitive view > of the table. > > I realize this may have other implications for the UI, but I think it > would be a useful enhancement. I agree with you, but this is very difficult to implement in XXE. As a workaround you could sligthly change the DocBook CSS style sheet to make thead, tbody and tfoot look different (for example, different background-color). This could help content authors to ``see what they are doing''.
