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

Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> I've played with this a bit, and there are certainly a lot of
> interesting things that you can do with CSS nowadays that would preserve
> some semblance of semantic markup on both the DocBook side and the HTML
> side.

As I said, I'm happy to do the legwork of improving the markup if someone
will point me in the right direction. But I know next to zip about CSS,
so it would not be productive for me to do the basic design there ---
it would take too long and there would probably still be lots to criticize
in whatever I came up with.

(I note ruefully that my original design in e894c6183 *was* pretty decent
semantic markup, especially if you're willing to accept spanspec
identifiers as semantic annotation. But people didn't like the visual
result, so now we have better visuals and uglier markup.)

> But my conclusion is that this new direction is bad and the old way was
> much better. My vote is to keep what we had in PG12.

I'm not willing to accept that conclusion. Why are we even bothering
to support PDF output, if lots of critical information is going to be
illegible? (And even if you figure PDFs should go the way of the dodo,
almost any narrow-window presentation has got problems with these tables.)
Also, as I've been going through this, I've realized that there are many
places in chapter 9 where the documentation is well south of adequate, if
not flat-out wrong. Some of it is just that nobody's gone through this
material in decades, and some of it is that the existing table layout is
so unfriendly to writing more than a couple words of explanation per item.
But I'm not willing to abandon the work I've done so far and just hope
that in another twenty years somebody will be brave or foolish enough to
try again.

regards, tom lane