Re: lynx-dev Is this List for Lynx users or *just* developers

[David Woolley]

> is NOT excessive use, and should be rendered by <table> correctly,
> because at the end of the day, all it is IS 'tabular data'.

Not in terms of the definition of the table element.   The introduction
to the Tables chapter in the HTML 4 specfication states:

   Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content...

and goes on to explain the problems that this can cause.

I think the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative guidelines can be summarised
as saying that the use of tables for layout is undesirable, but needs to
be tolerated in the short term, and only for documents not claiming the
maximum accessibility level, as better than frames, everything as images,
etc., but only until CSS positioning is reliably implemented and only if
the content linearies properly (i.e. reads sensibly, in a logical reading
order, when the tables (or CSS positioning) are ignored.

I realise there are even commercial tools whose sole purpose in life
seems to be to slice and dice pages into narrow columns with many col
and rowspans, but they are reacting to the market use of an inappropriate
tool, rather than the W3C position.

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