table-examples
Revision as of 14:09, 5 November 2005 by RobertBachmann (talk | contribs) (Reverted edit of VasaGum, changed back to last version by DrErnie)
Table Examples
As the first stage of the microformats The microformats process, this page collects Best Practices for Examples Pages of best/common practice for using the table tag to represent structured data.
The Problem
Thought often abused for layout, the original purpose of HTML tables is to provide a two-dimensional structure for data. The purpose of this exploration is to determine if there are common patterns for annotationg those structures, and (if so) whether there is a need to formalize that as a microformat (a la XOXO 1.0: Extensible Open XHTML Outlines for lists). The working hypothesis is tables typically represent two kinds of data:
- a list of dictionaries (with column headers, and sometimes row headers)
- a grid of numerical data (without any headers, or merely numeric indices)