(2003-01-29) Big Table Css

Dave Winer's been soliciting redesigns (preferably CSS-based) of the weblogs.com page, which is a table often containing over 1000 rows. I had some non-CSS ideas:

• make it a series of tables, each a max of, say, 100 rows. You just need to put a counter in your loop that outputs the stuff, and close/open tables when the counter hits 100. Would it even matter if the columns in various tables were different widths?

• Re-think the purpose of the page. Does anyone actually browse through 1000 rows? Maybe the User Story needs adjustment. (a) Maybe this page is only getting consumers by agents, in which case they can just hit the XML version, or you could just make a cruder non-table HTML output, or you could leave things as they are, since code that's each up the bits instead of rendering a big page isn't going to care. (b) Maybe people just want to check whether their short-list of favorites has been updated, in which case some sort of submit-list approach might make more sense. (c) If people are just browsing for something new, then maybe just show the last 200, regardless of time window. Or maybe just show 1 hour.

Please ignore any sentences that doesn't make sense (including this one).