[Plug] lynx enhancing tables

[Darxus <darxus@op.net>]

I've been working on lynx enhancing the PLUG pages, which involve a number
of tables.  There is a good bit of info on lynx enhancement, do some web
searches.

I ended up using a lot of binary spaces, hex A0, and <br>'s & <p>'s where
they wouldn't affect gui tables, but help make them more readable in lynx.
I'd be interested in hearing what you think.  You shouldn't notice any
diference with a gui browser.

I never heard of binary spaces before, and I don't have an ascii table
that goes into high ascii, but it's handling is apparently undefined in
the html standards, and basically gui web browsers ignore it, and text
browsers treat it as a hard space, so you can do things like pad fields.
You can insert this character in vi, in insert mode, by typing "ctrl-x a0"

GUI browsers ignore <p> & <br> at the end of a table element (<td>).

I used <p> (paragraph -- 2 line breaks)  just before the last <td> (table
element) of a <tr> (table row) -- to insert 2 carriage returns between
table lines in lynx, that a gui browser will ignore.

On the Members page, I inserted a <br> (line break) before the end of
every <td> (table element), so that every item would be on a seperate line
in lynx, but gui browsers would ignore it.

I used the following on the following pages:

Upcoming Meetings:
 * binary spaces to pad columns to line them up
 * <p> just before the end of the last <td> of every <tr>

Talks & Papers:
 * binary spaces to pad columns to line them up

Members:
 * <br> just before the end of every <td>
 * <p> just before the end of the last <td> of ever <tr>

History:
 * binary spaces to pad columns to line them up
 * <p> just before the end of the last <td> of every <tr>

I'm thinking about writing a perl script to take a .html file as input,
and output the same .html file with all tables lynx enhanced.

I'm currently pretty irratated that lynx doesn't just handle tables more
gracefully.  Just pad the ends of every column with spaces so they line
up, and if a line happens to be longer than the screen width, start
wrapping lines in each cell, like the gui browsers do.

__________________________________________________________________
PGP fingerprint = 03 5B 9B A0 16 33 91 2F  A5 77 BC EE 43 71 98 D4
            darxus@op.net / http://www.op.net/~darxus
                      "There is no spoon."




_______________________________________________
Plug maillist  -  Plug@lists.nothinbut.net
http://lists.nothinbut.net/mail/listinfo/plug