Re: Broken tables in HTML output

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Pali,

Pali Rohar wrote on Mon, Dec 03, 2018 at 11:20:45PM +0100:
> On Monday 03 December 2018 23:14:54 Ingo Schwarze wrote:
>> Pali Rohar wrote on Mon, Dec 03, 2018 at 11:01:42PM +0100:

>>> Seems that it is needed to put "border-bottom-style: solid"
>>> for rowspanned td element.  At least this is working in chrome.

>> That would further degrade the quality of the HTML code written by
>> mandoc.  As a rule, "style=" attributes should be avoided and CSS
>> should instead by used.  Unfortunately, that's not possible here
>> because the hard-coded presentational decisions like "draw a border
>> right here" are already contained in the tbl(7) input, and there
>> is no way to convert those purely presentational decisions of the
>> author into semantic or structural markup that could be handled
>> with CSS.
>> 
>> But at least the amount of "style=" attributes written should be
>> minimized.  Only those "style=" attributes should be written that
>> are required to correctly express the author's intent.

> This suggestion is to move border style definition from tr do td.

That would mean writing more "style=" attributes.
If a row intersects N cells, N times more.
That is not good.

>>> And after playing a bit I was not able to achieve visible border
>>> when was specified for tr element.
>>> 
>>> It is possible such change in mandoc generator? I understand that
>>> current HTML output is (or you think) correct, but is unusable in
>>> chrome browser.  And chrome is one of the major browsers, so it
>>> should not be ignored.

>> If you think chrome is important, please report the bug with chrome,
>> because right now, it looks like mandoc output is correct and
>> chrome rendering is buggy.
>> 
>> Alternatively, please explain why you think that chrome rendering
>> is correct, and please explain in which way mandoc is violating
>> the HTML standard, according to your understanding of the standard.

> I'm not saying that mandoc output is incorrect. Just I'm trying to find
> some modification or workaround which results in non-broken tables in
> chrome which are generated by mandoc. What I like to have is ability for
> users to see tables in manpages rendered correctly in current versions
> of web browsers.

I disagree with that goal.

It is not the job of some software to work around bugs in other software.
It is the job of the maintainers of the broken software to fix it.

If every program tried to work around bugs in other programs,
every program would become more complicated (and hence more buggy).
Time is wasted for devising, implementing, testing, and maintaining
workarounds that would be better spent fixing actual bugs.
And for the authors of the other software which is buggy, the
incentive to fix their bugs is also lowered.

So everybody loses.  In particular the users, because they end up
with *both* programs more buggy than necessary.

And no, the size of the chrome project is not an excuse for letting
bugs unfixed.  Quite to the contrary, the size of a project is one
of the reasons that lead to many bugs in the first place.  So the
bigger a project, the more important it gets to diligently fix bugs.

Yours,
  Ingo
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