Re: [office] table:is-sub-table attribute

[Michael Brauer <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Hi Thomas,

Thomas Zander wrote:
> On Thursday 26 July 2007 12:25:37 Michael Brauer wrote:
>> So, taking it all together, it seems to me that we cannot clearly say
>> whether it is reasonable to deprecate the attribute or not based on use
>> cases.
> 
> Hmm; we can't come up with a usecase that clearly shows the advantages of 
> the feature, and removing the feature does not disable known usecases.

Well, it is not that we did not find usecases. There only seem to be 
different evaluations of them.

We further have to take into account that we are not talking about 
adding a feature, but about deprecating a feature that we have in the 
specification for more than two years now. And that even the (wrong) use 
case of merging cells was just an example that we provided. We don't 
know whether there are implementations and/or documents that use that 
feature already for a reasonable purpose. We only know that we did not 
find examples where we unanimously agree that they are good examples.

Honestly, only based on the use cases we found I cannot clearly say 
whether I'm personally in favor of deprecating the is-sub-table 
attribute or not. But in this situation, I think it is a reasonable 
approach to correct exactly the issue that has been reported to us, and 
that's to my understanding the use of the is-sub-table attribute for 
merging cells.

> 
> I can only conclude one thing from those two points.
> 
> ps. I assume that nested tables are still possible without this feature. 

Yes.

> So we are not talking about removing any real functionality. Right?

No. Tables that have the is-sub-table attribute set behave differently 
than tables that don't have it set. One difference are the borders. 
Another difference is that tables that have the is-sub-table attribute 
set fill the entire height of the surrounding cell. This means that the 
last table-row gets a different height (it always fills the remaining 
space), what again may have an impact on text that appears vertically 
aligned in that row. Furthermore, the cell addresses for sub tables are 
different than the ones for nested tables.

Best regards

Michael


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Michael Brauer, Technical Architect Software Engineering
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