Re: Spanning rows in HTML3 tables

Steven J. DeRose (sjd@ebt.com)
Mon, 5 Dec 1994 13:59:16 -0500


At 1:44 AM 12/3/94 +0100, James Clark wrote:

>
>(element table (process-html3-table))
>
>In full DSSSL, of course, you have the query language and expression
>language so you could do this yourself, but it would certainly be
>convenient if you didn't have to for standard table models.

Something like this solution works pretty well. You could do it
either at the 'whole-table' level, or at the cell level. If the
latter, simply have a DSSSL Lite function which returns the value
for a given property, given the name of a table tagset. Hence
something faintly like:

(element entry
(width (column-width-calculator 'cals))
(justify (justify-calculator 'cals))
...
)

Obviously the function could be either multi-dtd, taking the
appropriate name as just shown, or dtd-specific, in which cas
the dtd choice should be part of the function name, not a parm.

There are only 5 table models I know to be in serious use, and
only cals is so far very portable; so there is not a huge range
of stuff to be dealt with.

Steve