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Subject:RE: Semantic markup for tabular data From:"Bill Lawrence" <scribe -at- matrixplus -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 21 May 2004 11:16:50 -0400
Most XML editors I've encountered either leave you to fend for yourself
with the table tagging (which I must confess is a little more than I can
handle for complex tables) or they provide a table editor. The table
editor may be a semi-WYSIWYG environment or simply an editor that
maintains a visual relationship of rows, columns, and cells. I find
that I need some sort of table editor for complex tables. Within
Docbook, each row, column, and cell is an XML tag itself, with
formatting attributes that I can set if I need to actually specify some
sort of dimension. Normally I don't set actual dimensions, instead I
set a percentage width for some columns and allow the publishing scripts
to figuring out the appropriate formatting for the output medium I've
selected.
The nice thing about this approach is that I don't have to tweak table
formatting much, I simply let the formatter do its job. If the results
aren't good (and yes, I do check every table) then I'll step in and set
widths.
I can conditionalize rows, columns, cells, and text tags within cells,
so I have some fairly complex tables that generate different formatting
and contents depending on the audience.
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