Talk:Display an outline as a nested table
Why display an outline as a table ?[edit]
The current Perl6 draft expresses some helpful puzzlement about this :-)
The answer is that there are two quite different modes of outline – topic nests and propositional nests.
- Sub-topics nested inside the topics which they sub-divide – the classic serially-labelled TOC pattern which the Perl 6 entry is showing.
- Supporting points nested under the key points which they support or clarify.
(And it may well be that the task example could helpfully be replaced by a clearer example of the latter)
When the outline expresses propositional hierarchies (rather than sub-divisions of domains), indented lines ('outlines') have two disadvantages:
- Logically connected peers are visually driven further and further apart as subordinate elaboration expands, and cognitive work is required to reconnect the 'sentences' which they form when read together.
- The 'vertical' metaphor of support (evidence supporting claim, example supporting clarity etc etc) is replaced by a visually less direct horizontal convention, and, again, takes some cognitive work to reconstruct.
A potential *weakness* of tabular representations of argument/exposition structures is, of course, that some horizontal contiguities are more meaningful than others. One solution is to add more space at the margins where the edges of sub-trees meet, and another is to distinguish adjacent subtrees by color – hence the extra credit task of using color to reveal the borders between sub-trees.
In short, tabular representation can be very useful in:
- the visual presentation of nested key points and supporting points (rather than sub-divided topics)
- and the teaching of argument structure.
(The current Perl6 color scheme rather helpfully shows that I failed to make this at all obvious or clear :-) Thank you ! Hout (talk) 04:36, 24 October 2019 (UTC)
When an outline is more a forest than a tree[edit]
The test sample here is an outline with only one top level root node – we can think of it as representing a single tree.
In practice, of course, an indented text outline will often have several top level (unindented) lines. To put it another way, many outlines represent forests – lists of trees – rather than single trees (or can otherwise be thought of as a single tree with a hidden virtual root).
FWIW I've updated the Haskell, JavaScript and Functional Python versions here to allow for the forest case by writing out a series of (wiki) tables, one for each tree, separated by a couple of linefeeds. Hout (talk) 15:19, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
For example, a forest outline – with several top-level nodes – like:
alpha
beta
gamma
delta
epsilon
zeta
eta
theta
iota
might be rendered by the following sequence of space-separated tree-tables:
| alpha | |
| beta | gamma |
| delta | |
| epsilon | zeta |
| eta | |
| theta | iota |
Hout (talk) 15:41, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
where the following (single root / tree):
top level
alpha
beta
gamma
delta
epsilon
zeta
eta
theta
iota
would have rendered as:
| top level | |||||
| alpha | delta | eta | |||
| beta | gamma | epsilon | zeta | theta | iota |