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[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] [ T a b l e m a q u i a . . . . ] [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] [ a . l y r i c a l . i n t r o ]
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According to the recent studies, tables become the most dominant cause of the internal eye monochromosm of the most tableatoric tribe population of the Zimnanbvuan republic. Tables were used as a weapon of mass endullination in the recent world browser war with some of the most catastrophic effects resulting in total tabuloma of more than hundred wobotic wormospiders. Thousands of unclosed tags were poisoned during recent leak of toxic table DTD because of uncontrolled chain interaction with frames. Secret investigations show that tables play more and more important role in the life of generic webroid. Used in moderate quantities, rubbed against the ball joints, pneumatically extruded across spinal cords, tables can serve as important tagtionary tool, increasing both facet-appealing visuality and reducing tactile chromosome casualties during network drowsing intercourse. |
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First time we saw tables implemented in Mosaic browser, we already had very alternative currents deep down inside our circuits about those tables. And the reason was not in the fact the rendering of the very second table example we have seen reminded us scrambled eggs, not because the third example confused the very bits out of the browser's electronic guts, so it, incapable to bear it anymore, politely disappered from the desktop. No, the reason of our decreased voltage was in some vaguely frightening intrisic complexity of tables, compared, say, to the IMG tag. Tables, we felt, were much more important, profound and useful element of the HTML. They hinted about possibilitiy to gain some control over layout, immensely expanding narrow scope of the original HTML from dull academic reserch to the toy of the wacky crowd of the artistically-inclined individuals. Originated as an oversimplified document-structuring tongue, HTML beared striking similarity to the some sort of degenerative digitirative programming language, delivering as much aestetical impact as a program printing "Hello, world!" to a teletype terminal. To the utmost surprise of its creators, HTML went out of control and started blinking with text, glittering with images, and begun quickly closing distance to the desktop publishing language. |
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As originaly devised by idealistically minded scientists, all the rendering decisions about HTML were left up to the conscience of the browser implementors. This way it would guarantee that text that go from left to right on one browser may be well rendered from top to bottom on another browser thus giving enough diversity, and more important, device independency. This was the only way for HTML to be rendered by common electronic devices, such as toaster, microwave and steaming iron. Obviously, such clever technique would allow people with 4x4 pixel monochrome display to watch 24-bit jpegs in all their 16 square pixel monochromatic beauty. To be honest, in their original utopian interconnected web future, far-fetching procreators of the web didn't think there will be many images anyway. Much less the tables. |
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Somehow, time passed, and lab-brewed interconnected utopian future with pornographic subtlety of a steam hammer hit generic homo right in its generic forehead. And now, in the web world circa 1996 it is not unusual to find an image on a web page. Maybe even two images or a couple of dozens. So it would be safe to say there are images on the Web. Sometimes only images. Without any accompanying text and/or sense. Sometimes photoshopped graphics is rubbed right into the eyeballs wihout any questioning or consent. So it might be a little hard to believe that not so long time ago, there were people wondering why would anybody want images in their hyper-text pages. And sometimes -- sometimes when our agonizing modem is choking on yet another 200K JPEG image of someone's pets or another 300K GIF containing colorful words "Welcome to my home page" -- we keep catching ourselves on having a disturbing thought passing through our superconductive synapses: "Those men might be not that wrong after all." With all that heavily antialiased imagery filled up pages and eating pupils out of our eyeballs, there was felt a deep-sucking urge to find an HTML construct to organize these page-crawling visual tokens into some highly-artistic intricate arrangemets with rare sparks of decorative pieces of text. A grid. Unfortunate victim called upon to realize these modern design arabesques was HTML tables. Nowadays it is hard to recall what was the original purpose of tables in HTML, but we can recollect they appeared together with HTML formula-layout capabilities and were considered as much as important. To the biggest scientific surprise, tables happened to be used a little more often than quckly burried inside public ignorance formulas, but used for different purpose than destined for them by inventors, whatever that purpose was. |
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Interesting to note, modern state of the art science offers simple and elegant solution to all these table layout perversions in a form of cascading style sheets, but since science is never factor in a software business, some companies were reluctant to incorporate style sheet support in their browsers, thus allowing people and alike to excercise their creativity in inventing deeply deviant tables, allowing tables to live much longer as a document layout tool than they deserved. Keeping all that table layout importance circulating our synaptic linkages, the only question left was: how to harness the power of tables. Power through knowledge, that is. Knowledge tigthly guarded by browser implementors and frequently obfuscated by the "People for Critical Treatment of Tables" movement. |
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Initially we tried to follow table standards and create high intensity markup tables. We have made numerous attempts to make our markup as much device independent and as much standard as possible, but numerous failures of common appliances to accept this standard markup make us to doubt our initial decision. After one of our members lost its vital gear joint in an attempt to feed our markup to stone grinder, we had made a conscious decision to concentrate on the visual side of tables, as much less dangerous occupancy. On the visual front we have quickly found that because table have rows, which in turn have columns, which, being mixed in reasonable quantities, produce cells, plus combined with the mythical (shall we say dangerous?) HTML device-independency, achieving desirable table layout effects proved to be an extremely difficult task. At least for us. |
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Absurdly disregard widespread tradition, we decided to RTFD, or in other words gain some initial knowledge from the table-related ducumentation courteously supplied by browser vendors. With a great care we fed the ultimate table tutorial to our non-linear sense supercollider, which, after short acceleration pause, hysterically radiating anti-sensinoes burst into tears, produced demonic laughter and finally locked up in an oscillatory hiccup. After we replaced burned down logic filters, installed superconductive nonsense attenuators and replaced blown fuses with cryptonite ones, we have found that our device was stuck on phrase containing something about "ordinary complex heuristics" which, as we discovered later, was exceeding Heisenberg's uncertainty threshold by the power of two.
Soberly acknowledged hardware failure, we made a decision to use traditional brute-force approach. We contacted 3-rd Martian Elite Abduction Squad which was in charge of abduction of earthlings at the time and asked them to send their zippy flying saucers to obtain several samples of earth programing specimens to extract subconscious information which possibly led to that table description our circuitry was unable to comprehend. To our biggest dismay extracted information was rather disappointing. As we have learned, "complex heuristics" was one of the code words programming specimen used to evade carnivorous manager specimen from their tails, while manager specimen used it to enhance strategic impact of the advertising brochures, and publications specimen used it to describe behaviour of the program that was hacked up right after the deadline and algorithm of such program was not known at the moment of the product release. Later on, when we were sufficiently puzzled by non-linear output we had got from The Browser, we developed an idea that our green martian friends might be not quite correct, and complex heuristics actually may take place. After all, drilling holes in a head is not the best way to reveal information from human subject. To clear up the case, we obtained some highly-classified knowledge (mostly by perusing On-Line Webster's) about heuristics as something serving to guide, discover, or reveal VALUABLE FOR EMPIRICAL RESEARCH BUT UNPROVED OR INCAPABLE OF PROOF. As we magically happened to know, behaviour of the most of the programs can be described using some sort of algorithm. Algorithm allows program to be predictable without causing increased blood pressure or suffocation spasms after user accidentally clicked on the unknown menu option. Using heuristics (a.k.a. rules-of-thumb) means that program may be able to generate somewhat predictable output for the most cases and generate absolutely unpredictable output for the rest of cases. Programs that generate unpredictable output in all cases usually employs "fuzzy logic" and "non-linear decision making," rather than heuristics. In our case we were lucky to have ordinarily complex heuristics. We shiver at the very attempt to imagine what would happen if extra-ordinarily complex heuristics would govern the behaviour of tables. |
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Complex heuristics aside, the tutorial had fairly decent page of examples touched all but the utmost perverted table usage. Ones we were looking for. In our searches we have came across another tables documentation, but it touched rather basics of table principles, while we were striving for hardcore decapitation of table tags. |
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Eventually, the motivating reason, the force that pushed our pistons and pulled our pulleys was this table RFC. While two other table documentation efforts we had found earlier were written by the browser manufactures striving to describe tables as they would apply to their browsers, Table RFC stood in grandeur of its ultimate absurdity, describing nothing. As art for the sake of art, Table RFC was erected, separately from the HTML standard, to point the Right Way of implementing tables to everybody who want to follow. As abstract as differential equations, was it describing in scrupulous details implementation of tables that will be. Falled for such enticing theoretical value, we decided to follow the letter of RFC and created a number of tables with consequent feeding them to the existing browsers. Results were rather intersting. |
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Thrust of the resulted stream of knowldge was so strong, we were unable to stop. Captivated by our motivations, we kept creating new and new examples of tables beating live and breathing binary flesh of the browsers, torn apart by our hyper torture. But we were inexorable. Executioners of executables, we were so halvanized, we did not hear our relays clicking and our transformers humming. Excited by the the bits of information we had obtained, we were striving for truth as much as our remote peers in Spanish Inquisition were, on the noble quest of eliminating the heresy in the eternal battle to free men and robots from under the control of devilish applications. Battle to make conscious creatures, as we are, to conrol the visuals, rather than unconscious dumb software -- the evil incarnation of the LALR(1) grammar . Simply speaking, we went out and created number of sample tables showing the twisted way of us trying to achieve our murky goals. |