datacapture.cfg XML tags

System

I have seen that the datacapture.cfg for metadata and the datacapture.cfg for DCT's don't support the same set of XML tags. By trial and error I found that rowcontinue and colspan are not supported in the datacapture.cfg for metadata.
I need to display my metadata in a better format and want to use the rowcontinue property. But this is not supported.
Has anyone used some other options? Why does the support of tags differ for both the datacapture files?
Is there any other option I can use to display my metadata better? (all I can do is a single column display. I would like a 2 column display?)

Thanks,
Aparna