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RE: HTML Column Width Trouble

by Eric Johnson-30 :: Rate this Message:

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HTML Column Width Trouble

Bob,

Thanks for looking in to this. It may not be "that" big a deal since it looks like XHTML is going the way of the Dodo.

As a work around we just conditionalized the column specs to only work for the PDF. Without specified widths the tables look passable in the XHTML.

Cheers,

Eric

From: Bob Stayton [mailto:bobs@...]
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 8:39 PM
To: Eric Johnson; docbook-apps
Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] HTML Column Width Trouble

I looked into this problem, and it appears that the tablecolumns.extension works fine in HTML, but not in XHTML. And as far as I can tell, the tablecolumns.extension has *never* worked for XHTML output. If someone has experience otherwise, please let me know.

Background: the basic problem that the tablecolumns.extension tries to address is that, according to the HTML standards, the units for widths of HTML table columns can be only one of three types:

- a number, which is treated as pixels

- a % value (of the table width)

- a relative value such as "2*" (which is not universally supported in browsers).

So any CALS column widths that are specified in units such as "cm" or "in" must be converted to pixels or they will be misinterpreted. The extension does the math based on some assumed conversion ratio. That is what happens when the file is processed with the HTML stylesheet:

The problem with XHTML seems to be a namespace problem. The stylesheet forms a temporary <colgroup> nodeset that it hands off to the Java extension functions written by Norm Walsh. When that temporary colgroup is formed in the XHTML stylesheet, it is in the default namespace, which is the XHTML namespace that the stylesheet sets up:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" ...

It appears that the Java extension functions do not handle elements in this namespace (not surprising if they were not written to do so). The result is that it just copies the colgroup back without making any changes, since it does not recognize the elements. In this case, the values of "1in" and "3in" in the CALS table specs are passed through to the XHTML output, where they are interpreted as 1 pixel and 3 pixels, respectively. That forces the columns to be as narrow as possible. The fact that some browsers actually understand "1in" and "3in" I put down to simply being a miracle since none of the HTML standards specify such units.

I confirmed that the namespace was the problem by stripping the temporary colgroup of its namespace before passing it to the Java extension. Then the extension worked properly and returned a colgroup with widths specified in pixels. That colgroup would then need to be converted back into the XHTML namespace before output.

The real solution is for Norm or another Java programmer to update the Java source for the tablecolumns.extension function to work with elements in the XHTML namespace as well as the null namespace. If I can't find someone to do that I'll change the table templates to strip the namespace before passing it to the extension.

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@...

----- Original Message -----

From: EMJOHNSO@...

To: bobs@... ; docbook-apps@...

Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 1:05 PM

Subject: RE: [docbook-apps] HTML Column Width Trouble

As a side note to this issue, Webkit (Safari and Chrome at least) based browsers do not seem to have a problem with the generated HTML output. Firefox and IE8 are unhappy with the HTML output however.

From: Bob Stayton [mailto:bobs@...]
Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 8:24 PM
To: Eric Johnson; docbook-apps
Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] HTML Column Width Trouble

Hi Eric,

When you say the "HTML does not come out right", can you be more specific? Can you show what the XML input is and the HTML output is?

Also, what version of the stylesheets are you using?

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@...

----- Original Message -----

From: EMJOHNSO@...

To: docbook-apps@...

Sent: Thursday, July 02, 2009 3:28 PM

Subject: [docbook-apps] HTML Column Width Trouble

When I set the colwidth for a CALS table the generated HTML does not come out right.

I'm using Saxon 6.5.5 and have the extensions turned on (and on the classpath). The graphics extension is working fine, so I'm pretty sure they are set up properly.

Is there something I'm missing?

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