I’ve been working on an old project lately, and I’m pretty happy about how it’s turning out. One thing I’m trying to do is consolidate a bunch of different documentation so that I don’t have to go to 3 or 4 different sites to get it. But I’m running into a really simple problem - some of the documentation doesn’t exist!
I’ve found a couple of good references (I knew they existed prior to this search) at The Web Design Group’s site. They have two comprehensive manuals available not just to reference, but to download. One is CSS and the other is HTML 4.0. The problem is that I’m not too interested in HTML 4.0, and would rather have an XHTML reference.
The neat part about these mauals is that they are published under the Open Publication License. This means that there is no legal impediment to my downloading the references and re-posting them on my site, as long as I follow some simple rules. There are many other sites that do this, including the pretty style-sheets.com. But the fact remains that there is no similar XHTML reference.
I grant that HTML 4.0 is not so structurally different from XHTML, but there are little technicalities. DOCTYPEs and case changes are among them. I’m thinking that it might not be too horrible a project to get an up-to-date XHTML schema and generate a documentation shell from it, but I don’t look forward to copying relevant bits of the HTML text into the new XHTML shell. Maybe I can hire someone offshore to do it for cheap…
Anyway, my dream of integrated PHP, XHTML, CSS, and ECMAScript references is slowly coming true. Soon, the combined documentation will be as nicely accessible and commentable as the PHP or MySQL reference manuals. Geez, it might even be possible to include a good SQL reference, or even the MySQL manual itself if I ask politely.
Another problem I’ve been toiling with is how to get Excel-like fixed columns and rows in an HTML table. I would really like to create a table that could scroll horizontally and vertically without losing the heading cells at the top and left of the table. Even with all of the work on CSS and people migrating steadily toward exclusive CSS use, I think that it’s time to revisit the table element in XHTML.
Everyone in the web design business writes about how terrible tables are and how everyone should use CSS. Well, I agree on their point as far as layout is concerned. Using CSS exclusively for layout is a good thing. On the other hand, while we’ve been including superb CSS support for positioning, we’ve completely neglected the table element for holding tabular data.
Tables turn out to be really inflexible at holding tabular data. The tag supports several elements that you don’t see used as strictly as they should be, such as colgroup and thead. It surprises me that tfoot still isn’t supported in supposedly 4.0-compatible browsers as it should be. (When pages break in the middle of a table, thead and tfoot are supposed to repeat on the table in the subsequent pages, but they don’t.) Moreover, there should be a scrolling feature added, as I’ve said before, if not in the table tags themselves then in CSS for the table.
And all of this wraps back around to a new issue: Firefox may be great at standards support, but I don’t see it driving any neat new features. At least when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was building up, Microsoft was in there trying to get standards passed. I don’t hear a lot about that from the Mozilla camp. Maybe it’s just because I’m not listening (and this is most likely the case), but it seems like the W3C is just plodding along these days without really getting innovative or looking forward.
Maybe the W3C should release an RSS spec. That might put to an end all of the syndication format issues. Hopefully they’d base it on Atom, right? Right? Anybody still listening?
