The sadly neglected tree-table
Neglected by HTML, at least. As far as I can tell, there’s no semantic way in HTML to represent a tree-table. A tree can be represented by nested lists, and a table by, well, a table, but there’s no way to combine the two.
Tree-tables are pretty commonly used by software applications, and with so many software applications being written as web apps, it is inevitable that we need to be able to display data in tree-table structures. The most common way of implementing them is probably to use a table with some sort of spacing to simulate the levels of the tree. I wish there were a better way. Maybe something using spans within list items with display:table-cell? Of course, IE doesn’t support that, so even if you could get something working that way, it’s not really a practical solution right now.
September 23rd, 2004 at 5:52 pm
This is very possible, and semantically correct if done right. See the SimpleBits article Styling Nested Lists. That, with a bit of Javascript Wizardry one can do exactly as you are looking to do.
Hope this clears things up
September 23rd, 2004 at 6:02 pm
Hi Alex, thanks for the links. Though actually they don’t even mention what I’m most interested in: combining a tree with a table. Just nesting lists and making them expand and collapse with javascript I’ve done before with no problems. It’s how to get the nested lists to display in a table format that’s tripping me up.
September 23rd, 2004 at 6:34 pm
oops… I guess I misread your post, I will contine to look to see if there is a solution to what you are trying to do