XML Companion, The, Third Edition

Table standards

Industry standards play an important role in defining models for constructs that are difficult to render on screen or paper, and the most common example of this is tabular matter. Structures like paragraphs, lists and warnings form a simple linear sequence, but table cells are arranged into a two-dimensional grid. An application must recognize the elements that represent column or row boundaries. Other complications include border lines, cells that straddle over adjoining rows and columns, and the various ways in which text can be aligned within each cell.

These typical table features may be described using additional elements or attributes, but if every document model designer adopted a different approach, an application that ...