[MPlayer-DOCS] Need some tips on how to make fancy tables with XML

[Guillaume Poirier]

Hi,

On 4/19/05, Diego Biurrun <diego at biurrun.de> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 11:21:46PM +0200, Guillaume POIRIER wrote:
> > I'm working on merging Rich's encoding guide into the XML doc.
> > I have started with writing sort of draft in HTML as I master HTML
> > better.
> > Attached are the HTML draft of the section on which I'm working, and the
> > patch against the XML doc.
> > The problem I have is that I don't know how to make a cell span over
> > several other cells.
> > Do you have any idea?
> 
> Why don't you simply keep the ASCII art?

Because I thought that it would look better that ASCII in the context
of an HTML documentation.
My first thought was: you make an ASCII doc, you use ASCII art, you
use XML/HTML doc, you use XML/HTML to illustrate your thoughts.


> I don't think the HTML table
> you created improves upon it...

I don't know, it's probably a matter of tastes. It's maybe because I
sent a work-in-progress draft that doesn't feature the proper "header"
of the tables, like "Top field" and "bottom field" in the second
table.

What should I do then? ASCII art, fancy XML table?


> > The other problem I have is that I'd like to be able to say: "this cell
> > has its background of this color" (for example, cells with a "C" on it
> > would have a red background, whereas a cell with a "L" would have a grey
> > background.
> > All that makes sense to me in the context : we're talking about
> > colorspaces, but AFAIK, the whole idea of XML is to separate display
> > from content, so I don't know how I'm supposed to handle that.
> >
> > Could you give me a hint in how to handle this?
> 
> You have to dive straight into the stylesheets.

Ahhh, crap! Am I supposed to alter it for my "personal" use?
I don't know stylesheets very well. I'll see what I can do.


> This looks good from a quick glance otherwise, commit it soon.

Ok. But before that, I still need to know how to make a cell span over
several others, don't I? :)

Regards,

Guillaume