Re: Side scrolling [was Re: LYNX-DEV Re: Setting up a fund ...]

[David Woolley]

> 
> That's what I was thinking... I'd hack the parser of the tables to just
> slug them into an array for each line... making sure to mark empty
> cells to keep track of columns. Then, pass the whole thing to a

That won't work except for the sort of table that is handled tolerably
well already by Lynx.  General tables require wrapping within a cell.
There are also legitimate cases where nested tables are useful (e.g. to
force a correct reading order on a non-tables browser!).  Nested tables
require recursive evaluation, or at least that you don't assign to columns
or groups of columns until you've seen all of the outermost table.

As others have pointed out, HTML 4 has provision to provide all the necessary
information up front, but I think it will be several years before this is
commonplace.  (MSIE 3 ignores such information; I haven't tried MSIE 4 on
it yet.)

> function (or a whole _mode_ of lynx) which would reparse this looking
> at all the columns in turn and figuring out the maximum length of
> fields and adjusting the width to that... and displaying it on the
> screen with calls to a [modified] filter that would remap the virtual
> display "screen" to the real terminal screen (not sure if ncurses does
> that). Then, when "view tables" module is exited, free all the memory
> associated so nothing is wasted. And you got yourself _my_ idea of a
> 2-pass parser :-)
> 
> I, for one, would not care if this had to _redraw_ the whole screen
> NOR would I care if it took lots more CPU cycles and swaping to
> get it up on the screen. Once something that horribly inefficient
> is written we BOTH have the TODO's table-support checked off AND
> it's an excellent base for someone to come along and optimize it!
> 
> My current term [of college] will test me already... I can't do
> any hacking of this magnitude until summer :-( And I say "magnitude"
> because it would have to be hacked on a recent version of lynx and
> released before too many changes are made to that version - so
> "simple" people could actually apply the patches without too many
> chunks failing :-)
> 
> Take care.
>