Re: lynx-dev proposal: rendering tables

[Chuck Martin]

On Mon, Apr 26, 1999 at 11:25:38PM +0500, Vlad Harchev wrote:
> 
>  IMO rendering tables can be greatly imporved with a cheap trick - we can
> render each cell of the table in separate line, but with different identation 
> for each column. Of course, it will take more lines to render the same 
> table, but will be much more readable. 

I haven't considered that particular idea, but I have considered several
others, and the real problem with all of them is that tables have been
abused tremendously, and no method really gives desireable results for
all of the possible abuses.

For one thing, most "tables" aren't really tables at all.  They may be
the equivalent of two web pages, but the author wanted them to be side
by side instead of one continuous page (which is the way lynx presently
displays them).  This is similar to frames, but without the frames.  If
we implement your idea, some pages will look okay until you get half way
or so through the page, and then the rest will have everything indented
by a set amount, which will definitely be annoying.

Another way they are used (and this doesn't necessarily have to be abuse,
but in nearly every case I've seen it used, it was) is to have another
entire table within a single cell of a table.  Depending on how many
levels there are of this abuse, and how many columns per row there are,
you could have things walking off the right edge of the screen and getting
really ugly.

I'm not saying your idea is a bad one.  It's at least no worse than
anything I've come up with.  It's too bad we can't read the author's
mind to find out if this is really a table we're looking at, or some
"clever" way of formatting the screen, and change our behavior
accordingly.  If there weren't so many people abusing tables, we
wouldn't have such a difficult problem.

Your idea is certainly worth a try, and could always be backed out if
the side effects turned out to be too ugly.  Maybe your idea could be
implemented along with some way of indicating where a table started and
ended.  That might clarify what was happening when some of those abuses
caused strange things to occur.

Chuck