Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 04/27/07 10:38

Scripsit Ben C:

> For me the essence of a table is that it represents some function of
> two inputs.

Markup is about relationships, not functions and input. A table is a data
structure, not a function. A table is logically a list of lists with the
same number of items and with some meaningful relationship across the inner
lists so that the n'th items in inner lists have some connection with each
other. For example, a simple table of results in a game, with names and
points scored by each player, is a two-item list where the n'th item of the
first list and the n'th item in the second list are connected so that the
former contains the name of a player and the latter the result of that
player. This is a logical (or abstract) structure and need not have any
visual manifestation; the table might be internal to a data base so that you
can only ask for a result by the player name and get a single result.

Similarly, a structure consisting of a list of paragraphs and a list of
annotations to them is a table purely logically. Admittedly, none of the
cells in it is a simple name-like thing, as the player names, by which you
could make queries. But this depends on the nature of the content.

> So, for example, if I have "foods" in the rows, and
> "vitamins" in the columns, I can lookup how much vitamin A in a
> carrot, or C in an apple by reading the values of the function from
> the table.

(Off-topic: Carrots don't contain vitamin A; they contain provitamins from
which vitamin A may be produced by humans and other eaters.)

Besides, you could use lookup on the other columns as well, e.g. to find out
which food contains most vitamin C, or more than 50 mg / 100 g of it, or
something like that. You could do this with a program if you open the HTML
table in MS Excel for example. Some day some browser vendor might even get
the wild idea of letting users manipulate tables in a spreadsheet manner.

> Annotating text with notes doesn't really have this characteristic,
> although you could probably stretch the idea.

There is no need to _stretch_. Lookup issues are not essential in tablehood,
and they depend on the nature of the content, among other things. For prose
content, you would just need different lookup methods, such as looking for
paragraphs (or notes) containing some specific words or patterns.

> But, to answer your question, the table of vitamins and foods is
> something that is more tabular.

It's a more typical table, but not more of a table.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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