Re: lynx-dev Header alignment problems

[David Henderson]

> > I believe this is happening because both DIV and TABLE are setting the
> > alignment of all embedded things to LEFT by default, rather than leaving

> This is perfectly legal behaviour.  Browsers are allowed to set their own
> styles.

But I don't like this behavior, and I think it's a bug.  It eliminates
the distinction between different levels of headers unnecessarily, and
that makes it difficult for me as a reader to read documents that have
headers inside either a TABLE or a DIV... I can't see the organization
of the document visually.

I believe that this bug exists as a side effect of a change in <TABLE
ALIGN=center>'s handling.

As an example, this mini-document:

<TITLE>Test document 1</TITLE>
<H1>Main header</H1>
<H2>Secondary header</H2>
  <P>some text</P>
<H3>Tertiary header</H3>
  <P>some text</P>
<H4>Quaternary header</H4>
  <P>some text</P>

Is displayed apparoximately as so:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                               Test document 1
                                 Main header

Secondary header

   some text

  Tertiary header

   some text

    Quaternary header

   some text
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's all well and good, but THIS mini-document:

<TITLE>Test document 2</TITLE>
<TABLE WIDTH=400><TR><TD>
  <H1>Main header</H1>
  <H2>Secondary header</H2>
    <P>some text</P>
  <H3>Tertiary header</H3>
    <P>some text</P>
  <H4>Quaternary header</H4>
    <P>some text</P>
</TD></TR></TABLE>

Is displayed apparoximately as so:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                               Test document 2
                                 Main header

Secondary header

   some text

Tertiary header

   some text

Quaternary header

   some text
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Definitely faulty.

> Layout issues like this are never bugs, because HTML is a NOT a page
> layout language.

Right, and Lynx is a browser.  And if Lynx makes it more difficult to
browse, then it's a bug.  There's a reason that different headers are
displayed different amounts, to make it easy to distinguish them at a
semantic level (since font sizes aren't "yet" available in Lynx :-) ).
So I'd like to restore Lynx's original behavior to not auto-flush-left
all headers in TABLE or DIV.

David Henderson
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<*> davidh at psiphi.org, davidh at imsa.edu, davidh at cyberdesic.com