table-examples

From Microformats

Table of contents

1.1 The Problem
1.2 Participants
1.3 Real-World Examples
1.4 Existing Practices
1.5 Proposal (N/A)
1.6 See Also

Table Examples

As the first stage of the microformats process, this page collects examples of best/common practice for using the table (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/tables.html) tag to represent structured data.

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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 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)

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Participants

Dr. Ernie (http://www.opendarwin.org/~drernie/)

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Real-World Examples

Best practices (http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200410/bring_on_the_tables/) for marking up tabular data (especially for accessibility)
- < th scope=col|row id="name"> for headers
- caption, summary

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