Should Be A Table

While I was falling asleep last night, the thought occurred that I should have the comments in a table. Not for aesthetics, but to achieve better semantics. Time for me to take a glob of my own medicine.

Before the comments were placed into a list. The list was only telling of a relationship of order in which the comments were posted and that they were all comments for the post. The list was not telling that the authors could be related in some other manner. Compared with a table if I post two comments, then there will be two rows with �Seamus� as the value for the author column. Now the table can tell us that there are two comments both authored by �Seamus.�

Part of making the table more powerful semantically is paying attention to non-showing tags and attributes. With the CSS, I hide the headers and the caption. As my teachers have told me, �always have a caption for your figures.� I tied together all the author table cells with by announcing the ID of its th (header=”commentsAuthorCol”). And then that same th, it announces that it is a header for a column (scope=”col”) and information is list of people (axis=”people”).

See also: Complex Table Inspector

• When: Saturday 2006 February 11th.
• Filed: Site, Frontpage, Web Design.
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