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POHow to represent invisible name-value pair data associated with HTML table row?
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copied!<p><strong>Background</strong></p> <p>I am presenting data using a HTML frameset. The left-side frame is a navigation tree-table constructed as an HTML table. Only minimal data is shown in this frame because I want to use the right-side "details" frame to give the user more details when he selects one of the navigation table rows.</p> <pre><code>+----------------------------+ | | | | tree | "details" | | table | pertaining to | | nav. | selected | | | row | |=selected=| | | | | | | | | | | +----------------------------+ </code></pre> <p>Think of this like a directory browser where you can see filesize, type, modification date, etc. on the right when you select an item in the left-hand tree.</p> <p>Obtaining item details server-side is a sequential task, i.e. to get details on the nth item, the server has to work through all n-1 preceding items. For this reason, I think the most straightforward way to present the detailed data to the user is to have the server embed all detailed information within the navigation table rows and have a script generate the details page in a right-hand frame.</p> <p><strong>Question</strong></p> <p>How should I represent the detailed data within the navigation table HTML? Should I make up my own element tagnames? Should I use extra columns that are not displayed? Or something else? The data is typically name-value pairs - both name and value can be text. Each element may have a different set of data pairs. Is there a standard way to represent user data within an (X)HTML document?</p>

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