[thelist] Marking up the right way

Chris Heilmann lists at onlinetools.org
Thu Mar 24 03:42:34 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:
>

To make the page serialise properly you'd also need to set either
headers/id pair or the scope attribute. I am not sure that the whole
structure is not a bit too complex to follow if you put them all together,
in essence what you are giving is a lot of data on each person on a search
result page. You do mix the detail and the search result page, something
you won't find in any web shop for example.

One option to make the table a lot easier would be to put the extra data
after the table and link it via an anchor, then you could do some DOM
magic to show it for the high end user.



-- 
Chris Heilmann
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/



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