Schedules online: in tables or plain text?

A friend emailed me:
"I'm putting up some intranet pages for Ministry of Such-and-Such on my project and I'm doing a schedule for a travelling roadshow on one page. (Date, location, room, who's attending etc.)

I remember that you had a nice clear way of laying out your writing workshop schedule and wondered if you had a copy you could send me?

I don't really want to do the table format thing - especially as I'm using Frontpage and don't have a lot of expertise with it!
Cheers, Ginny"

There's more than one reason for avoiding tables when putting this kind of information online. Tables are fine when they are short and narrow enough for everything to be seen without scrolling up, down or sideways. The minute your table extends beyond one screenful, usability plunges.

Can such schedules be classified as data? If so, it should be OK to display a limited amount in a table. But I see them as borderline between data and prose, so they're not brilliantly accessible in a table.

Luckily there is an easy solution: plain text. And strangely, a schedule often occupies less space as plain text than as a table. Here's what I wrote to Ginny:

"Hi Ginny

Well, I have no record of those pages but as a general rule, I try to:

never use tables for text
cram as much as possible on each line, to avoid scrolling and the baggy-britches effect
use bold for headings
don't use indents except in bullets
always include the year in dates to prevent ROT
repeat key words in subheadings if the page will be more than one screen.

Accordingly, here's a draft page for your intranet to start you off. The key words "Stop the Litter Roadshow" are repeated for every location, so that people could scroll to the bottom of a long list and still know exactly what it is.

And this kind of intranet page, printed out, is just as readable as if it were in tables.

Cheers, Rachel"

"Stop the Litter" roadshows 2006

To register, contact your HR manager before 9 May 2006. Lunch supplied - just bring yourself!

Wellington "Stop the Litter" Roadshows
Tuesday 1 June 2006, 10am-4pm, Thistle Room (BSBldg level 3)
* Attending: all case managers from Wellington district and the CEO
Thursday 3 June 2006, 10am-4pm, Nettle Room (BSBldg level 3)
* Attending: Jane Eyre, Long Tall Sally, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Bob Dylan, Elizabeth Windsor, Elizabeth Bennett, Hedda Gabler, Marcel Proust

Palmerston North "Stop the Litter" Roadshow
Tuesday 9 June 2006, 10am-4pm, Board Room, 111 Bridgen Street
* Attending: Little Orphan Annie, Kate McAlpine, Elsie McAlpine, Xena, Yokuzuna Takanohana, Oliver Twist, Prince Hamlet

Wanganui "Stop the Litter" Roadshow
[and so on]

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