[uf-discuss] Re: hCalendar for events in a table format

[Ryan King]

On Mar 5, 2008, at 7:30 AM, Tantek Çelik wrote:
> On 3/5/08 5:02 AM, "Toby A Inkster" <mail at tobyinkster.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> However, implied headers like this while lowering the barrier to  
>> entry for
>> authors, would considerably raise the barrier for parsers -- mostly  
>> because
>> of colspan and rowspan, which would be an absolute pain to handle.
>
> Speaking from the experience of working on a browser rendering  
> engine which
> *did* have to handle colspan and rowspan, I can certainly state that
> requiring a microformats parser to perform a table layout  
> (effectively what
> it takes to support colspan and rowspan) would *drastically* raise the
> effort necessary and would introduce numerous opportunities for  
> subtle bugs
> and incompatibilities.

Though I don't disagree with you that requiring table layout is too  
much, I just wanted to point out that the current HTML5 draft includes  
a more fully specified algorithm for determining table headers:

   http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#header-and-data-cell-semantics

-ryan