Re: Poll: Is a calendar tabular?

On Oct 13, 5:50 am, Ben C <spams...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 12, 12:51 pm, Lars Eighner <use...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is a calendar tabular data, logically meriting table markup?
Don't confuse display with the underlying data.

The point is that a table _is_ a way of displaying things. There isn't
really any such thing as an abstract table.

The pont I was making was that, in document markup in HTML you would
use a table to contain calendar 'data' and in a database you would use
a table to contain calendar 'data.' But you wouldn't create a database
calendar with rows consisting of weeks and colums consisting of months
and days, and you would create an HTML calendar with events as rows
and attributes as columns.

Well --- I suppose you ~could~ do both of these, but it would be
really weird and probably much less useful. I could see it in HTML
more than a database, I mean, how would you compose a SQL query if you
had the databaase table mimic an HTML calendar?

The real distinction is between using a table to represent some
meaningful relationship between things (which is considered OK) and just
using one to position things on the screen aesthetically (which is
considered improper on slow Friday afternoons).

Yeah, well, this was sorta my point, too. In an HTML calendar the
'meaningful relationship' is between events and dates, days, weeks,
and months. In a database calendar, the 'meaningful relationship' is
between event attributes, like place, time, type of event, dress, name
of host, as well as date. For example, you could search both an HTML
calendar and a database calendar for all home football and basketball
games, but your search strategy would be very different, and I dare
say that your database search would be a lot more efficient and a lot
less time-consuming that the HTML search.

\From the former you can work back to the artificial concept of "tabular
data"-- the data are tabular if there's some useful purpose to
displaying them in a table. It doesn't have to be the _only_ way to
display them or to represent them in a database.

The question was:
Is a calendar tabular data, logically meriting table markup?

The answer is, it depends on your purpose.

CC

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