Alan J. Flavell wrote:
On Fri, 23 Jun 2006, boclair wrote:
An org.chart could be regarded (very loosely speaking) as tabular
data. I wouldn't dismiss it as mere "layout".
However, fitting even a simple one into an HTML table is more than a
little fiddly. Where there are cross-relationships - rather than
simple hierarchical ones - it rapidly gets out of hand.
The acid test of any solution is what it produces as its end product
(i.e the served-out HTML document and any accompanying stylesheet).
No matter how clever the script may be, it can't produce anything that
could not, at least in principle, be hand coded.
Thanks for helping me think through this problem.
Yes. It is those relationships in dealing even with a low complexity
organisational structure which create a something of a markup nightmare
especially when it is needed, for display purposes, to contract parts of
the tree and expand others.
I take the point that an organisation chart could be considered tabular
but one of the problems with tables are that they are rather inflexible.
It doesn't required much of a change to the displayed data before the
table has to be replaced with entirely new markup.
I thought the benefit of server side scripting would be, with a database
backend, that it would assist in getting some flexibility into
variations to the markup. It is not proving easy nor within cost
parameters at the moment.
Falling back on the old method of using a suite of images and image
mapping is looking more and more attractive both in production
complexity and cost.
Louise
