On-topic: HTML/JS help please

[Simon Wilcox]

On 11/2/10 17:25, David Cantrell wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 05:02:07PM +0000, Simon Wilcox wrote:
>> On 11/2/10 16:28, David Cantrell wrote:
>>> I assume that the reason is that people haven't bothered looking at the
>>> site.  Because if they did, they would see obviously tabular data.
>> You didn't cite a link but I assume we're looking at something like this:
>> http://deps.cpantesters.org/?module=HTML%3A%3ATreeBuilder&perl=5.10.0&os=Linux
>> Doesn't look very tabular to me. I see a bunch of stuff lining up but 
>> that's not the same as a table.
> 
> Actually, that's exactly what a table is.
> 
> A time*table*, for example, would be no good if stuff was thrown at
> random all over the page.

Hmm, yeah fair point. I wasn't making myself very clear there obviously :-)

I think I meant that each column only has a relationship in it's row. 
There's no vertical relationship, unlike a timetable which has 
relationships in a vertical and horizontal direction. Lining columns up 
in your case is largely presentational. Not that there is anything wrong 
with that, it would be an ugly mess if they weren't.

I don't think that a table is the only way to represent that data, 
unless you have particular accessibility concerns that require one. I'm 
not seeing anything in the html that suggests that though.

I would start by putting the SBRD, results by version and pass bar into 
a div and floating it right. That will make them all line up against an 
enclosing div that's not as wide as the page.

Then put the fail scores into a div and float it with some cunning 
margin jiggery pokery to hang it out on the right, outside of the 
containing div.

The tricky part is making the SBRD div float just to the right of the 
longest module name. I can't think of a sensible way of doing that at 
the moment and am as ever deficient in tuits to work on it.

It might not be possible but it probably is solvable and then you can 
use the tools that already exist for manipulating trees in Javascript.

By the time you've flung enough divs at it to make it work, you'd 
probably rather have solved the problem of collapsing rows in a table 
instead :-)

S.