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

[Jason Karns]

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 1:45 PM, Ryan King <ryan at theryanking.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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I am a little worried about dropping support for hCalendar in table
markup.  If the most semantic markup for a given hCalendar is in a
table, then to use hCalendar authors would be required to use
less-semantic markup.  I think we can all agree this is not a desired
side effect of using microformats.  We would then have the table-based
markup situation of the 90's, only reversed. (using alternative markup
such as divs and spans where tables *should* be used).

~Jason