Re: Poll: are people okay with function/operator table redesign?

Isaac Morland <isaac(dot)morland(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> If we were only concerned with HTML output then based on the desired
> semantics and appearance I would recommend <dl> without hesitation. Because
> of the need to produce PDF as well and my lack of knowledge of the Postgres
> documentation build process, I can't be so certain but I still suspect <dl>
> to be the best approach.

Yeah ... so a part of this problem is to persuade DocBook to generate
that.

As I mentioned upthread, I did experiment with putting a single-item
<variablelist> in each table cell. That works out to an annoying amount
of markup overhead, since variablelist is a rather overengineered
construct, but I imagine we could live with it. The real problem was
the amount of whitespace it wanted to add. We could probably hack our
way out of that with CSS for HTML output, but it was quite unclear whether
the PDF toolchain could be made to render it reasonably.

A desirable solution, perhaps, would be a <variablelist> corresponding to
the entire table with rendering customization that produces table-like
dividing lines around <varlistentry>s. I'm not volunteering to figure
out how to do that though, especially not for PDF.

In the meantime I plan to push forward with the markup approach we've
got. The editorial content should still work if we find a better
markup answer, and I'm willing to do the work of replacing the markup
as long as somebody else figures out what it should be.

regards, tom lane