Re: PRE and TABLE - a proposal for changing their relationship

Benjamin Franz (snowhare@netimages.com)
Sun, 10 Sep 1995 21:32:12 -0700 (PDT)


On Sun, 10 Sep 1995, Lambert wrote:

> >Something that has bothered me for a long time now is the decision to
> >not allow <PRE><TABLE>...</TABLE></PRE>. I tried looking in the archives
> >but didn't immediately find out why this was done. It appears clear to me
> >that in the real world of badly broken content negotiation and
> >a general unwillingness to maintain two documents whith the sole
> >difference being the use of HTML 3 TABLE, <PRE><TABLE>...</TABLE></PRE>
> >would provide a much more robust transition strategy from HTML 2 to HTML 3.
>
>
> Another way you can accomplish this is to use <TH><B>...</B></TH>, and <P>
> at the end of every element. In Netscape, this onlt has one extra line
> before the table. If viewed by an AOL browser or another HTML2 browser,
> then all the headings are bold, while the elements are normal. This doesn't
> work with rowspan and colspan obviously. If youwere to use <BR> instead of
> <P> then for each <BR>, Netscape would display another line. This is
> probably also illegal, but it works in AOL and Netscape. I haven't tried it
> in any other browsers.

Ummm...No - it doesn't do quite the same thing ;-). <PRE>...</PRE> is
useful for non-table aware browsers when making tables specifically
because of its whitespace preservation and monospaced presentation.
Tables need both for anything beyond the most simple usage.

-- 
Benjamin Franz