I have a repository of aircraft technical documents that are converted to HTML. The markup is incredibly ugly now because of the decision to use table-based formatting. I'd like to remove everything from the tables except, well, tables. The thing that has me stumped is that the documents are required to display revision bars in the right-hand margin alongside the data that has been changed since the previous version. Of course, what was done was to add a narrow column to the right and display the cell borders where necessary.

Does anyone know of a way to accomplish this same revision bar effect with CSS instead of tables? Although sometimes there will need to be revision bars to the right of particular rows of actual tables, in addition to elements like paragraphs and list items.

I think this could be accomplished with Javascript, but I'd like to see if there's a CSS-only solution to begin with.

Okay, here:

http://xnoubis.org/revbar.html

The p elements and the inner table are necessary. The outer table is only there to draw the revision bars at the right. It would be nice if I could remove the outer table and draw the revision bars with CSS.

That would be an improvement, I agree. But before I transform the entire repository, I'd like to find out whether there would also be a way to generate the revision bars for the table rows without having to restort to a fake outer table.

Couldn't you just add a border to the element based on a class of "changed" or something? Maybe I don't understand the questions. I you trying to dynamically draw the bars when a change is made? Then you would need scripting for sure.