Re Tables

Terry Allen (terry@ora.com)
Fri, 6 Aug 1993 15:41:02 PDT

Omy Ronquillo asks about Tables. The best you can do now is
mess around with PRE; there is a Table content model in the
HTML+ DTD, but at the WWW developer's conference (is someone
going to post a review of that event?) no one liked it because
it would take two passes to format it. It was suggested that
PRE would be good enough ad interim.

The Tex approach was mentioned, and deserves consideration:
Texbook ch 22, "Alignment," covers Tex's various mechanisms,
one of which uses a preamble, sorta like a troff table header.
We could do a crude approximation of a table preamble by
allowing a line that specifies the number and width of columns
with actual spaces and separators, sorta like variable tabbing.
Would such a mechanism make it possible to format tables in
a single pass?

Regards,

-- 
Terry Allen  (terry@ora.com)
Editor, Digital Media Group
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
Sebastopol, Calif., 95472