Some thoughts about tables...

Title: Some thoughts about tables...

Hello,

Just some thoughts about tables and why they are so hard to deal with…  It might be pretty basic, but I think it's helpful to review this from time to time.

Tables use positional presentation to communicate semantics.  Sometimes this is the easiest way to show the relationship between things.

If you have regularly repeating relationships that you are using all the time, then you can encode this as a set of data, and later render it as a table.  In DITA, I suppose you could encode this as a specialized topic, and then you would typically output it as a table, although you could also output it in different formats as well.  For example -- 

Address book / contact information (name, address, phone numbers)

Historical stock market price data (stock name, symbol, open, high, low, close)

Parametric data for electronic components (parameter name, symbol, minimum value, typical value, maximum value)

Any other set of regular data that could typically appear in your documents.

For this type of thing, you don't need to encode it as a table in your XML.  You create a specialization for this kind of information, and it goes into your DTD, i.e. your local version of DITA.  You encode the info using the DTD's tags that indicate the kind of information it is.  You later can render it as a table, since that's often the best way to present this kind of thing.  Since you know what the information is, and what it normally "looks like", you can define the table column widths and so on ahead of time, as part of your XSLT, which also gives you uniformity in presentation across all your documents.

If you have a unique block of information, whose structure is unique or unusual and would be hard to reuse, this is when you would need to use a table, actually encoded as a CALS table with rows and columns and so on, and created using a WYSIWYG table editor.  It is only in these situations where you need all those special attributes and controls (@scale).  Because of the nature of the business of technical writing, this kind of thing happens all the time, so you really need to have a way to do this.

Regards,

Seraphim 

___________________________________________________________

Seraphim Larsen                  ICG Technical Publications

Sr. Technical Writer                      Intel Corporation

(480) 552-6504                                 Chandler, AZ

The content of this message is my personal opinion only. 

Although I am an employee of Intel, the statements I make 

here in no way represent Intel's position on the issue, nor 

am I authorized to speak on behalf of Intel on this matter.

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