Re: a compromise on tables, etc.

Pei Y. Wei (wei@sting.berkeley.edu)
Fri, 3 Dec 93 23:59:50 -0800


> In TeX, the basic mechanism for advanced layout is the construction
> and stacking of boxes. My BOX tag suggestion is analogous. Is there
> no one else who thinks that it is both simple and useful?
>
> Jay

Oh I agree. I've been *using* something just like this BOX tag in the
new ViolaWWW. Except I've been calling it HPANE, and it has MINWIDTH
and MAXWIDTH constraint attributes. Good idea about using em units--
am currently using pixel units (started as a quick simple experiemnt,
ya know). Yeah, I find it a very simple and useful way to format
things.

Such tags are of course rendering/formatting oriented, but sometimes
when one just gotta have certain formatting behaviour, it's better to
just use this box tag rather than convolute the use of semantic tags
to get certain layout.

-Pei