[whatwg] Table integrity and conformance

[David Walbert]

On Oct 26, 2006, at 9:27 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:

>> It might be interesting to have some sort of testing with the "axis"
>> attribute too, or maybe we should drop it.
>
> I think it should be dropped due to lack of implementations and use  
> after being in HTML 4 for years.

It strikes me that the axis and headers attributes could both  
potentially be very useful; but if I were to use them, I'd almost  
certainly generate the table and attributes with server-side script  
(such as PHP), and then there would be no need for the HTML  
attributes since I could generate any desired reports the same way.  
They seem to me to provide alternative functionality for tables in  
lieu of an actual database, but if the tables aren't generated from a  
database they'd have to be marked up by hand, and that would be a  
tremendous amount of work in which errors could easily be introduced.  
That may explain why the attributes are underused.

Is the headers attribute any more widely used than axis? I admit I've  
never used either, but I don't typically generate complex data tables.

____________________________
David Walbert
LEARN NC
dwalbert at learnnc.org