[UI/UX] Handling tables

[JayPanoz]

Tables have always been quite an issue and their rendering can become quite terrible in CSS multicol (cells being cut off, vertical padding not being properly handled, etc.).

There’s no easy way out there, and it’s probably up to authors to find solutions but we can at least try reaching interop with some popular apps that will open the table in a dedicated web view (on top of the current one, with a close button) if the user double-clicks or double-taps one.

A few notes as to why this should be reasonable:

• authors’ scripting is already taking this feature into account since you can find it in iBooks for instance;
• for large tables, that would allow overflow-x (on the web view itself), something we can’t easily do in the paged and scrolled views (we would have to add an extra wrapper around the table since overflow won’t work for table itself…);
• it is expected styling for the table (excepted inline style="") will not apply in the dedicated web view;
• there will be huge tables to handle as people can become very creative when it comes to finding reasons why those tables must absolutely stay as they are in print (personally encountered the “moral rights of the author” justification a few years ago).

Please feel free to add your thoughts, obviously.