<script type="text/csv">This is inspired by Tab
Atkin's <csv>
proposal (and in fact is a slightly modified version of his code).
I don't believe that a new element containing a completely different
format with new parsing rules feels like it fits very well into HTML;
you might as well start adding a <TeX> element
instead of MathML, or a <pdf> instead of SVG.
There are already several ways of embedding other forms of content
in HTML5. Among the options are
simply including it in <pre>, possibly with
a <code
class="language-csv"> inside of it. You can use
an <object> if there's a plugin to support your
embedded data. But I think the best option for this particular use
case is <script>; HTML5
now allows
it to be used for "dynamic script and data blocks", and I'd say that a
chunk of CSV, possibly to be rendered as a table, would count as a
data block.
Here are some examples of how this could be used. I'm basing the
MIME type off of RFC
4180, which includes a header property to indicate if
the first line is a header. Based on Tab Atkin's example, I've also
added a separator property to allow you to set the
separator; this lets you use this same technique for tab separated
values instead (though you probably should just use
the text/tab-separated-values
MIME type for that instead.
Note that in order to support fallback for browsers that have scripting
turned off, I've added a CSS rule to display scripts with a type that
begins with text/csv:
script[type^="text/csv"] {
display: block;
}This fallback mechanism works in Safari and Firefox, though it doesn't seem to work in Opera unless I open up the DOM inspector and click on one of the script elements.
Of course, we have to ask ourselves if we're actually solving any
real problem here. Sure, CSV is a common format, but why is there a
need to embed it in HTML? HTML has a very powerful table system built
in, so creating a special purpose element (or re-purposing an existing
one) for a much simpler table format doesn't seem like that much of a
win; and if you need to quickly and easily turn CSV into an HTML
table, it's not very hard to do so. I get 181,000 hits on Google
for "csv to
html", so I think that's a solved problem. And if you need to also have
a machine-readable format, you can always add a link to the CSV the
table was generated from in the <caption> or something
like that.
So, without any particularly compelling use cases for embedding CSV
into HTML, I'm not sure if this is worth all that much other than as a
demo of how you can use <script> for embedding data
in your own format, for processing with JavaScript.
header=presentseparator=\t;header=present