[microformats-discuss] XHTML tables as CSV-like "records"?

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 10/2/05 11:33 AM, "Ryan King" <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:

> On Oct 2, 2005, at 10:48 AM, Brian Suda wrote:
> 
>> In Tantek's talks he mentions XHTML Compounds. This does not exactly
>> provide itself for one of those, but the talk also discusses some of
>> the lesser know attributes already build into tables, such as AXIS,
>> HEADER, COLGROUP, ROWGROUP, ID, etc[1]. Even some of the regular
>> elements, TBODY, TH, etc. These already have some semantic meaning, so
>> a new microformat might not be needed for this application? it all
>> depends exactly what you want to do with it? you could simple write an
>> XMDP using pre-exisiting attributes instead of trying to overload the
>> CLASS attribute when there is something semantically better.
>> 
>> [1] - http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/tables.html
> 
> I second that- there's a lot of semantic table markup to explore[1].
> 
> Ernie, in your particular case, I think you've already captured most
> of the semantics. A table, is by definition a list of records, so
> this fits well with what you're trying to do.

Right.  Before jumping to a microformat, we should always first ask, can I
"just" use XHTML elements to do this?  And if not, can I create a simple
XHTML compound to do this?

Only then is it worth jumping to exploring a microformat.

I used the example during my last talk at WE05 of -- how many of you have
seen or written markup like:

<div class="header">

instead of

<h1>

etc.?

And the nervous laughter that followed made it quite clear this is
acknowledged as a common mistake (ironically, the same mistake that the
writers of that aforementioned article made).


> 1. I attribute this gap in our practice to the fact that we're still
> recovering from presentational tables.

Indeed.  This is one of the reasons I decided it was about time we started
talking out loud about "semantic tables" and used it as a new example in the
update to "The Elements of Meaningful XHTML".

 http://tantek.com/presentations/2005/09/elements-of-xhtml/

Thanks,

Tantek