 - Issue 01 - Nov 1996.iso/mac/Edition Web/TableTool ƒ/NetBut.gif) |
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| HTML TableTool |
| This small HyperCard stack quickly converts data from spreadsheets or databases, saved as standard tab-delimited text files, to HTML-tagged files that produces beautiful tables with the net browser Netscape 1.1. It is a good idea to study the files Tables in Netscape 1.1 and The Table Sampler, before using the TableTool. The stack handles the most important tags described in these documents. For more complex tables, you may also need to use COLSPAN and ROWSPAN. Please note that some of this may change when the proposed HTML 3.0 becomes a standard. |
| A sample table | ||||||||||||
| HTML TableTool is easy to use, hit the Help button, read the short text and then experiment with the sample file ³TestData.txt² until you get the result shown below:
If your tables don't come out as expected, there is often something wrong with the source files. When the data is part of a larger spreadsheet, copy it to a clean sheet and save it as ASCII text. Be careful with formatting, selecting a whole row
and setting it to bold, for example, will cause ClarisWorks to save the whole row, not only the cells with data. If you erase some data at the end of the table with the Delete key, ClarisWorks will still export the empty cells, use Clear in the Edit menu instead. |
| Non-ASCII characters |
| Normally, your HTML editor takes care of tagging special characters with ASCII numbers over 126. If you live in ASCII world, you can probably uncheck the ³Non-ASCII² check box in the TableTool and save some time. Those of you, who like me, needs characters such as åäö, will appreciate that the TableTool can convert these to å, and so forth. If you do, you must also take a good look at Niklas Frykholms HTML Pro. In this nice program, you type the source text in one window and gets the tagged result in a second window. This is, by the way, how I got hold of the tags, thank you Niklas! |
| Tables, tables |
| Here is another example of a table, in fact, the whole layout of this document builds on tables. Although it would be possible to fit everything in one table, it is more flexible to use one table for each section of the document. Why? Using tables is one way of producing a more typographically pleasing page. For much more on this subject, take a look at David Siegel¹s refreshingly different pages! For the best view of this page, follow Davids advice and set the font size in Netscape to 14 p. Virtually anything that you can put on a page can also go inside a table. This, of course, includes images, with links, if required. Use tables to arrange buttons in ways that would otherwise be very tricky or impossible. In the trivial example below, CELLSPACING=0 and CELLPADDING=0 took away most of the space between the buttons. |
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| Version history |
| Version 1.1.2 corrects my stupid mix up of Column and Row Headers. Row Headers can now be left aligned, something that can be useful for lists. A WIDTH up to 100 is tagged as % and values over 100 as pixels. Not wishing to insult anyone, ³Foreign characters² is now Non-ASCII again. Version 1.1.1 will apply the proper image tags to a string that includes .gif, .jpg or .jpeg. In the example above, Disk.gif will become <IMG SRC="Disk.gif">. Version 1.1 (not released) adds the attribute CELLSPACING and an [optional] value for BORDER. Large tables, that exceeds the text field 30 kB limit, can be saved directly to disk. The CENTER tag now has a check box. The text of a caption is automatically selected (Non-ASCII characters typed into the text field will NOT be converted). A Help button gives some help. If you find any problems with or have suggestions for HTML TableTool, please don't hesitate to contact me, at the address below. Many thanks to those of you who inspired me to these improved versions of the tool! |
| Bertil Holmberg, Malmoe University Hospital, SWEDEN Version 1.1.2 8/18/95 |