Re: [docbook-apps] table footnotes in the table

[Larry Garfield <larry at garfieldtech dot com>]

Bob Stayton wrote:

> I find putting the footnotes into a row of the table to be confusing, and
> unnecessary as far as I can tell.  Also, I don't think it is necessary to
> output footnotes per tgroup (although that situation is probably pretty
> rare).  I'm considering changing the XSL stylesheet for HTML output to place
> all the footnotes for a table in a div after the table, not after each
> tgroup.  This would more closely match the FO output, and a class attribute
> on the div would allow a CSS stylesheet to style the footnotes as needed.
> Any comments?

If I'm understanding you correctly, then yes, I agree that using a table 
row doesn't make much sense.  It's not, strictly speaking, tabular data 
(or part of the same tabular data, anyway), so it breaks the semantic 
meaning of the data to do that.  It might make sense if it were done as 
a tfoot section so that it could be referenced/styled separately, but 
tfoot is broken in HTML IMHO so I generally try to avoid it, period.

(Aside: By broken I mean implemented incredibly stupidly.  By having 
tfoot come before thead, there is no backward compatibility whatsoever. 
 A browser that doesn't know that tfoot should be a "footer" will 
render it above the table, which is silly.  As a result, I never use the 
thead/tfoot/tbody structure in HTML.  But I digress...)

A following div would make sense as an alternative.  Another option, I 
suppose, would be a separate table in a following div.  Footnotes could 
be argued to be tabular data (footnote symbol and content as two 
tables), but separate from the tabular data of the original table itself.

Add CSS to taste.

At least that's the input of an HTML purist new to the DocBook XSL 
system. :-)

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Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
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