[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by phillipgessert

A great book that's far less dry than the title would suggest!

I was just watching this great video today:

"Why Road Barriers Stopped Killing Drivers"

And about halfway through the video, they flash a few tables showing off death/safety statistics:



Bleh!!! Ptoowey!

1. You see all that centered alignment?

It makes it impossible to skim your eyes down a column and COMPARE rows. (The entire purpose of using a table in the first place.)

If you right-align numbers, all:

• 100s line with 100s
• 10s with 10s
• 1s with 1s

2. All those $ signs in every row?

Get rid of those and move those into the column header.

3. You see all those vertical lines?

You think you need them, but they're useless.

4. You see all those horizontal lines between rows?

You think you need them, but they're useless.

Optional exceptions: 1 above/below the table + 1 between the header/data.

(This visually separates the table from the text itself.)

* * *

Here's 3 versions of the same table in various stages of cleanup (from worse->better):

Spoiler:

Version A (Alignment):

----------------------------------------------------------
Severity          |  Minimum  |      Mean  |    Maximum 
                  |  Cost ($) |  Cost ($)  |    Cost ($)
----------------------------------------------------------
Fatal             | 190,200   | 4,288,422  | 10,100,000
Disabling Injury  |  89,200   |   781,094  |  3,300,000
Evident Injury    |       0   |   174,335  |    955,500
Possible Injury   |       0   |    98,188  |    955,500
PDO               |       0   |    10,582  |     42,298
----------------------------------------------------------

Version B (Remove verticals):

----------------------------------------------------------
Severity           Minimum         Mean     Maximum 
                   Cost ($)    Cost ($)     Cost ($)
----------------------------------------------------------
Fatal              190,200    4,288,422   10,100,000
Disabling Injury    89,200      781,094    3,300,000
Evident Injury           0      174,335      955,500
Possible Injury          0       98,188      955,500
PDO                      0       10,582       42,298
----------------------------------------------------------

Version C (Remove horizontals):

Severity           Minimum         Mean      Maximum 
                   Cost ($)    Cost ($)      Cost ($)

Fatal              190,200    4,288,422   10,100,000
Disabling Injury    89,200      781,094    3,300,000
Evident Injury           0      174,335      955,500
Possible Injury          0       98,188      955,500
PDO                      0       10,582       42,298

And here's what an HTML recreation might look like:



Same exact data. Perfectly readable, perfectly understandable.

Tools you need? Alignment + spacing.

Bold is optional (although not even needed).

Originally Posted by hobnail

My vague memory is that it worked. I only tried it on the kobo and kindle.

Thanks for the info. Last I tried it (a few years ago), I was having trouble with moving <caption> to the top:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/...S/caption-side

so I gave up and didn't look much further. (I remember it working on a few of the devices, but failing on many others.)

It may be okay for very simple tables... but the kinds of complicated tables I work on, I just wrote off the entire thing.

But I'd definitely be open for anyone else's testing/research on it. In all these years on MobileRead, I can't recall anyone ever really speaking about <caption>.