[thelist] Marking up the right way
Justin Stach
j.m.stach at canterbury.ac.uk
Thu Mar 24 03:26:26 CST 2005
Hello all,
I'm working on a sort of phonelist thing and I'm spending time thinking
about how best to mark this thing up so it makes sense.
Some background: User will enter search criteria, system returns an
abbreviated set of results (i.e. shows Name, Telephone, Title, Dept and
Room) for each person in the result set. The user can then click on the
name and it will open up and reveal extended information on that
person.
So I'm thinking that although the result sets fall neatly enough into
table data, the expansion thing is problematic. At the moment I'm
looking to replace the contents of the row with a single <td> which
colspans the length. Inside that row I've put a <dl> which defines the
person more closely. Code below:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title></title>
<style type="text/css">
@import url(test_layout.css);
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table id="tableResults" summary="This table holds the results which
are returned after searching for people." border="1">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Favourites</th>
<th>Name</th>
<th>Extension</th>
<th>Title</th>
<th>Department</th>
<th>Room</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>?</td>
<td>Jim Bur</td>
<td>5555</td>
<td>Senior Lecturer</td>
<td>Sports Science, Tourism & Leisure</td>
<td>xx</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>?</td>
<td colspan="5">
<dl>
<dt>Jim Ho</dt>
<p>Send email, Save vCard</p>
<dd>
<dl class="personDetails">
<span class="image">
<dt>Image</dt><dd>[here]</dd>
</span>
<span class="left">
<dt>Job Title</dt><dd>IT Support Specialist</dd>
<dt>Ext</dt><dd>2222</dd>
<dt>Dept</dt><dd>Computing Services</dd>
<dt>Room</dt><dd>Rf34</dd>
</span>
<span class="right">
<dt>Building</dt><dd>Ray</dd>
<dt>Email</dt><dd>j.f.ho@</dd>
<dt>Site</dt><dd>Main</dd>
<dt>Username</dt><dd>jim</dd>
</span>
</dl>
</dd>
</dl>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>?</td>
<td>Jim St</td>
<td>1111</td>
<td>Mobile Support Specialist</td>
<td>Computing Services</td>
<td>x</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</body>
</html>
Obviously it's not ideal, but it's not the worst solution. The question
is that given there will be a change in the scope of the data being
viewed by the user (less to more) is there a neater answer than the one
above. The other one I've played with is to abandon tables and create
everything as definition lists which carry more or less data. Maybe a
nest of definition lists within an ordered list? I don't know - any
thoughts would be appreciated at this point.
Justin
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