Speaking of tables

BlueGriffon — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:04:00 +0200

One of the nice features of text editors is table formatting. Think MS Word and its Table Autoformat dialog. It's very easy to implement that in BlueGriffon... Hehe

CSS rules only... #2

BlueGriffon — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:49:00 +0200

Tables are much nicer when the only attribute they carry is a class or an ID, aren't they?

CSS rules only...

BlueGriffon — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:20:00 +0200

One thing that has always puzzled me in existing HTML+CSS wysiwyg editors is the impossibility to create a table in a really strict markup context. I mean a table with no presentational attributes at all, no inline styles at all and only a class and/or ID or the table itself. Although almost nobody writes such tables, it's fairly simple for the most common attributes. I suspect it's for three reasons only : first, web sites use a lot of borderless tables ; second, existing editors don't let you do that ; third, most people don't understand CSS well enough. Let's suppose our table has ID mytable. Then we have the following equivalences:

for the border attribute on the <table> element if the value if not "0".

#mytable {
 border: outset <value_of_the_attribute>px;
}

#mytable > * > tr > td,
#mytable > * > tr > th {
 border: inset 1px;
}

for the cellspacing attribute on the <table> element

#mytable {
 border-spacing: <value_of_the_attribute>px;
}

for the cellpadding attribute on the <table> element

#mytable > * > tr > td,
#mytable > * > tr > th {
 padding: <value_of_the_attribute>px;
}

the rules and frame attributes on the table element is only a little bit more complex but it's a non-issue to map such an attribute to CSS rules.
the width, align and valignattributes on <table> and descendants of <table> are also a non-issue with a trivial mapping to their CSS counterparts
for the deprecated align attribute on <table>, a combination of 'margin-left: auto' and/or 'margin-right: auto'

In other terms, it's not a problem implementing an editor that provides a user wishing to insert a table with the following choice : "HTML attributes only", "Inline styles when possible", "Style rules or inline styles when possible". As a matter of fact, it's already implemented in BlueGriffon. Please don't focus on the UI since it's absolutely not final, it's even sure it's going to evolve a lot for instance to let the user reuse existing CSS style rules instead of creating new ones.

BlueGriffon.org - Tag - table

Speaking of tables

CSS rules only... #2

CSS rules only...