71–80 of 94 posts
People from Show HN - watch and learn.
https://people.inf.ethz.ch/markusp/teaching/guides/guide-tab...
There was some design blog post several years ago, maybe not even surfaced on HN: Creating beautiful tables both UI and UX wise, with some features being e.g dropping separator between columns (row?), doing some visual accents, etc. And yes, the most distinguished feature was that the tables weren't looking like your busy PowerPoint non-tech organisation stuff, they were very modern yet simple. I don't remember the s…
The example they show of a Great Table is, to my taste, way too busy. Here is my unsolicited opinion: The top and bottom horizontal rules on the Title appear to be superfluous, and I dislike how it is aligned with the first column (row labels) rather than the second. I feel like a little space to breath at the bottom, along with a bold font would add visual hierarchy w/o the clutter. The row label backgrounds are far…
In contrast the census manual chooses to center almost all labels within their box, and when not it is almost always due to indentation, and moreover is unafraid to set column widths to fit the data not the labels, with indent and hyphenation to match. The result is both horizontally compact and intuitively comprehensible.
edit: on further reflection I also think it’s a crappy title. Titles and captions should convey context, scope, purpose - and may otherwise be omitted entirely for the editorial sin of failing to justify their own existence. As given, this one could be retitled “Table 1” with no loss of information or generality. For an article that’s trying to discuss and reformulate tabular presentation from first principles, that’s a tad disappointing. Since table titles form a crucial layer of their information catalogue, it is hardly surprising that the census manual devotes an entire chapter to the matter of title construction, and even though somewhat domain specific and archaically worded it is well worth the visit
Tables, when you really care, are so very difficult to get right. Sometimes you really want to densely compact the data to communicate all details to others who are already deeply invested in the dataset, sometimes you need to remove all but the most essential information to get across a single idea with clarity, and then there are a continuum of variations between those extremes. The problem expands into more dimensions when the media becomes a consideration-- you simply can't (and should not) use the same approach when dealing with pdf's vs html vs a slide-deck. On top of all that, you often have a personal style that you want to get across, or have a style that you need to comply with in some inflexible way.
I like how gt just NAMES the parts of table in their docs (and in the schematic in the article). This is a problem where agreeing on what things are called makes a ton of difference in usability.
The example they show of a Great Table is, to my taste, way too busy. Here is my unsolicited opinion: The top and bottom horizontal rules on the Title appear to be superfluous, and I dislike how it is aligned with the first column (row labels) rather than the second. I feel like a little space to breath at the bottom, along with a bold font would add visual hierarchy w/o the clutter. The row label backgrounds are far…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Plus he has an entire treatise on why PowerPoint is terrible. As someone trying to build a PowerPoint competitor, this is awesome. I'm going to start here and work my way through his whole corpus
See also https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/
This a good article with some fascinating history. More recent history involves the production of CALS tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALS_Table_Model . The company Datalogics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datalogics was heavily involved in the CALS table initiative. Datalogics staff was part of the ISO committee forming SGML, and trained many people on SGML, including DoD staff and their contractors involved w…
Indeed. I don’t think it’s all correct, though. On Visicalc, it says “The grid cells couldn’t be styled with borders for presentation purposes, the values couldn’t be formatted, and the tables couldn’t even be printed”
I think I even the first version had (limited, of course) formatting support.
http://www.bricklin.com/history/refcard3.htm says the “/F” command allowed setting justification and setting the number format to, for example, dollars and cents.
It is for version 1.35, but I think even the first version shipped supported at least showing dollars and cents.