Status of Tables in HTML+?

William M. Perry (wmperry@banana.ucs.indiana.edu)
Wed, 08 Sep 1993 08:20:30 -0500


Just curious as to what the status of the table is in html+ after the
W^5?

I heard that most people were concerned with it taking two passes to
parse a table. Although this isn't a hideous problem (I have
rudimentary table support in my emacs browser), it would be nice not
to have to do it. :)

Has anyone proposed something similar to LaTeX's tabular environment?
This has to have a 'template' at the beginning saying how many columns
there are and how they are justified. This would solve the problem of
how many columns there are without parsing the thing twice.

I would propose a new attribute for the TBL tag - COLUMNS=#, where #
would be how many columns the table should be formatted as. <TH> and
<TD> would still have the colspan, rowspan, and align attributes.

Would anyone have any major objections to this? Alternatives?

-Bill P.