[xsl] Building Dynamic width Cals Table

Subject: [xsl] Building Dynamic width Cals Table
From: Mailing Lists Mail <daktapaal@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2012 18:24:17 +0000
Hi All,
I have a question regarding the building dynamic width cals table.
We have an editorial system, and a publishing system (this creates
intermediate XMLs, which will be then translated to HTML through
XSLTs.) We have two options of how to carry out our design editorial
DTD.

Option1
======
Have Cals Table in the Editorial DTD model, so editors will be able to
define their content in a table , and adjust the widths of the columns
etc,, This gets into the publishing system and the tables are
translated to HTML and we are fine.

Option 2
======

We decide against having the tables in the DTD, because we would want to
  a. Not have presentation specific information in the XML
  b. Have the XML purely with the Semantic information...

Option1, is straight forward and there is no real thinking about it..
I have doubts about the Option2..

1. Is it correct design to *have* the presentation specific markup (
Tables etc..) in the XML.. There are people arguing for it and against
it.. So would like to know from the elite members of this group, what
they thiink about it..
2. If we go ahead with *not* having the tables. We face issues with
the table column width. So the stylesheets creating intermediate XMLs
should be creating cals table, and  should be able to work out the
correct width based on the content of the column. Is there anybody out
there who thinks it is possible to do this conversion without having
too many issues..
3. If we ignore "evaluating" the column width, then can we fix the
column width to some intelligent guess on a fixed length and assume
the HTMLs to automatically wrap the content, when the content length
is more than the length of column.. so if I have <table width="700"
style="table-layout:fixed> or some such thing, I should hope that the
HTML should be able to autowrap, without me doing anything to fix the
table width?

Your help is very much appreciated in advance
DT

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