Réf. : Re: [9fans] mothra

Réf. : Re: [9fans] mothra

[boyd.roberts]

    The next real hard part is getting the layout (especially tables!)

sed | tbl | troff

you see the way i'm thinking?

[9fans] Re: Réf. : Re: [9fans] mothra

[Howard Trickey]

> sed | tbl | troff
> 
> you see the way i'm thinking?

Yes..  Now how do you draw a line from
the end of the troff pipe back into tbl in
your diagram?  You need the full power
of the layout engine available to the table
processer, as sizing depends on the layout
of nested tables in a very insidious way.
and the real fun begins when a cell is allocated
a certain width, and the contents don't fit.
Or when the various width and pad specs
of the whole nested set of tables are
impossible to satisfy simultaneously.
Then you have to "give up" in exactly the
same way as Netscape and IE...
(I seem to have the phrase burned on
my brain, don't I?)
And then try to handle images of unknown
size arriving later, and try to minimize the
number of unnecessary trial layouts.

Most of my layout bugs were due to
tables.

- the fool

[9fans] Re: [9fans] Re: Réf. : Re: [9fans] mothra

[Lucio De Re]

On Wed, Jul 19, 2000 at 08:31:09AM -0400, Howard Trickey wrote:
> 
> Yes..  Now how do you draw a line from
> the end of the troff pipe back into tbl in
> your diagram?  You need the full power
> of the layout engine available to the table
> processer, as sizing depends on the layout
> of nested tables in a very insidious way.

That seems unavoidable.  And you've been there, I haven't :-)  But it
strikes me as a recursive descent problem that should really have only
one solution, or, at worst, scroll bars :-)

> and the real fun begins when a cell is allocated
> a certain width, and the contents don't fit.
> Or when the various width and pad specs
> of the whole nested set of tables are
> impossible to satisfy simultaneously.

Perhaps some scaling knobs in the right places...

> Then you have to "give up" in exactly the
> same way as Netscape and IE...
> (I seem to have the phrase burned on
> my brain, don't I?)

... rather than rely on previous foolishness :-)

> And then try to handle images of unknown
> size arriving later, and try to minimize the
> number of unnecessary trial layouts.
> 
Except for the need to match prior art (which I understand and hope to
be right in disregarding) I believe we can solve all these problems,
if for no other reason that typography is not a recent invention.  If
we aim at elegance rather than "accuracy" (intentional scare quotes),
and we make the product readily available, we may just swing enough
decision makers to make a difference.

If lynx wasn't so hideously ugly, I believe it would have made its
mark in this sense too.

> Most of my layout bugs were due to
> tables.
> 
How many were actual errors, versus mere divergence from a crooked de
facto standard?

> - the fool
> 
Your experience is undoubtably invaluable.

++L

Re: [9fans] mothra

[Colin DeVilbiss]

> If lynx wasn't so hideously ugly, I believe it would have made its
> mark in this sense too.

c.f. w3m, a unix curses-based web browser with pretty good table
rendering, and one which can render frames by making them look like
tables.

http://ei5nazha.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~aito/w3m/eng/

speaking from experience, it's good enough for me, but, being tied to
cursor-addressability, isn:t a candidate for a direct port by any means.

-- 
Colin DeVilbiss
crdevilb@mtu.edu

Re: [9fans] Re: Réf. : Re: [9fans] mothra

[Steve Kilbane]

> > sed | tbl | troff
> > 
> > you see the way i'm thinking?
> 
> Yes..  Now how do you draw a line from
> the end of the troff pipe back into tbl in
> your diagram?

Well, I'm wondering if that needs to be there in general,
anyway. I was thinking about providing user input for
forms, and thinking about the browser sending that input
to a separate program that reformats the component for
the browser.

Rather than receiving one-time data and attempting to process
it, perhaps the browser can receive data from many streams from
the translators, and tell each to reformat as the surrounding
cells shuffle.

> Most of my layout bugs were due to
> tables.

s/bugs/problems/ ? how many of them were real bugs, rather than
brain-damage from page designers?

steve