(mgp-users 00515) Re: massive changes....

[Alex Madon <amadon@megalinux.com>]

Hello,
Yes! You are right ;)
The first point is:
1) it seems to me that a syntax "a la XML" should be more powerfull than a syntax
with newlines and percent symbols.
2) the process of tables is another problem. The challenge is that we want to
format
the table to fit into the computer screen. This is is independant of the syntax
used.
Of course, that would be very interesting to add (even simple) table process in
MGP.

Processing of tables in general is very complex in general (see how Netscape's
dealing
with HTML tables...).

We  could begin with accepting "simple" tables. "simple" could mean tables where
each cell doesn't need to be written on several text lines. As LaTeX was doing
beofre it admits a p{40mm} in its tabular syntax.
The good thing is that XML allows you to refine you syntax easily in time.
A minimum sytax could be:

<table size="5">
<tr><td>aa</td><td>01</td></tr>
</table>
where the size parameters is the only parameter you feed your table routine with.
You can count the number of characters in each column and then display each line.
Size would be the parameter that fix the font (it could be fixed before, out the
table tag by a
tag like <font size="5">).

The size parameter should be fixed at first by the user; later MGP could provide a
function that computes the best size for the table to fit in the computer
screen......

cheers
Alex


> >> In XML *you* define your tags.
> >> Of course you can create a tag in your MGP syntax you could call
> >> <table> that will then call special table functions that don not exist at the
> >> moment.
> >> But if you don't *want* provide functions that process tables, you just don't
> >> create
> >> a table syntax.
>
> Well, I agree. what I'd like to say is...
>
> When we have an XML file like this:
>
>         <booklist>
>           <book>
>             <author> author A </author>
>             <title> title A </title>
>             <price> $10 </price>
>           </book>
>           <book>
>             <author> author B </author>
>             <title> title B </title>
>             <price> $20 </price>
>           </book>
>         </booklist>
>
> if you want to display this XML like:
>
> Booklist
>       author A
>         title A
>           $10
>
>       author B
>         title B
>           $20
>
> this could be easy for mgp. but if you want to display it like:
>
>   Booklist
>      author        title        price
>     author A      title A        10
>     author B      title B        20
>
> this will require lots of work.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Yoshifumi Nishida <nishida@csl.sony.co.jp>
> Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.

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