Re: Tables

Dave_Raggett (dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com)
Thu, 12 Aug 93 12:23:26 BST


> 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 HTML+ model *will* be fast to display - the first pass is only needed
once, when the browser first retrieves the document. Subsequently, the table
can be displayed efficiently using information cached from the first pass.
I will knock some code together to show how this is done in the near future!

Remember that browsers are forced to parse the document once anyway in order
to size scrollbars. The additional cost of tables will be quite small.

Gosh, its a shame I couldn't get to the workshop.

Dave