On Mon, 8 Nov 1999 mcmahill@mtl.mit.edu wrote:
> On 8 Nov 1999, Nathan J. Williams wrote:
> > That said, I'm going to get back to futzing with this, hopefully
> > making a more non-table-happy version. Someone in this thread talked
> > about making tables that render gracefully as non-tables; I'd
> > appreciate suggestions on practical ways of doing that.
> 
> if its a server side hack, I'm not too thrilled because if you grab a
> snapshot of pkgsrc you might want to follow the README.html's on your
> local machine, ie file:// URL's.  If it can be done in HTML, I'm ok with
> it.

  On non-table browsers the document is rendered as if the table tags were
not there.  So relying on alignment with a header line (especially when
there are empty cells) or (even worse) relying on multiple lines (<BR>,
lists, etc.) within <td> tags matching the same lines in the next <td> tag
can cause problems.  If you use one <td> tag per line and fill in every
cell with a visible character then it is at least possible to read it on a
text browser. It is text browser friendly if you do not need to count
cells to find out what a given value means (or there are only a few
columns).

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@pgh.net