Questions for Christina and Ben

[awunderground]

Ajjit and I recreated your main example with library(gt) and then added a few more examples here. We look forward to your feedback!

Overall Questions

1. What rules do you use to determine column widths?
2. What should missing values be labeled as in the table (ie blanks, —, NA, etc). Right now all missing values of have values of —, including values in the summary rows.

Extension Questions

Source Notes

1. What are the styles for sources and notes?

Footnotes

1. How should source notes and foot notes interact? Which comes first?

Row Group Labels

1. What should the styles for these be? Right now they have 0 padding on the left side and are italic to separate them from cell values.

Spanner column labels

1. The spanner looks too low when it spans only a few columns. What should the style here be?

Summary Rows

1. Should there be a different style for summary rows (ie Total, Avg, Sum, etc). Right now they match cell value styles.

[madebychristina]

Overall question 1: we feel like this is defined by the browser or container. This is a Q we would happily chat about

[madebychristina]

overall question 2: we can talk about this, dash is fine as a default but this should be overwritten if needed

** perhaps we should pull in someone from the editorial team to advise as a few of these questions veer into their space

[madebychristina]

Source: for web "source" is bolded 11px lato and then actual source info is 11px regular lato; I can give a visual. Notes: same style as source. We have the order as Source first and then notes below. I can give a visual.

[madebychristina]

footnotes: we should pull in an editor and grab some examples for you all

[bchartoff]

On footnotes and missing data defaults, one to pull in editorial is to source some examples, but I have to imagine these things vary center to center/group to group. Defaults great, but will need to be able to override as well.

[madebychristina]

https://www.figma.com/file/P1WbDD4dChRBf071U4Aqub/31521-table?node-id=3%3A0

Row group Labels - here is a visual example of this at play.

[madebychristina]

Spanner column labels - should hold the same style as the column headers. I'm not sure I see or understand the concern so perhaps we can talk about this together?

[bchartoff]

On Summary rows, we think that's more a table-by-table stylistic choice, not something fundamentally structural to all tables. Can certainly imagine a user might want to bold a table like that, but don't think we need to mandate it across every table. E.g. what if there's a "total" row that isn't a sum, but an average across all groups? Should that get the same special treatment? Maybe not! But again, can come down to an individual editorial decision.

[bchartoff]

Also in the example above, note Christina used grey cell backgrounds to visually separate out columns. Would prefer that method to using any dashed lines anywhere. And for the examples y'all have where the 1st column needs a visual separator, a solid vertical line works well, we think.

[awunderground]

Overall question 1: we feel like this is defined by the browser or container. This is a Q we would happily chat about

Even if the table width is determined by the browser or container, don't we still need heuristics for determining the relative width of columns?

[bchartoff]

Overall question 1: we feel like this is defined by the browser or container. This is a Q we would happily chat about

Even if the table width is determined by the browser or container, don't we still need heuristics for determining the relative width of columns?

That's what we're saying, relative widths are set by whatever table-making tool (word, HTML, etc). I know in html it's more complicated than "max-content width + x padding", there's a lot of internal logic that is a bit of a black box, and varies browser to browser. What are the use cases where you need to set hard widths?

[awunderground]

@bchartoff Let's forget tooling for a second. What heuristics should table creators at the Urban Institute use to determine the relative widths of columns to match Urban Institute styles?