[Bug 11812] The align attribute on the td and th elements should be conforming

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11812

--- Comment #4 from Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3cbug@gmail.com> 2011-03-18 16:48:52 UTC ---
I agree that it's very common to want to align particular table cells
differently, depending on their contents.  Cells that have something like a
checkmark or X in them should be centered, for instance, and that comes up in
lots of tables.  E.g., just in the last few days I've been working on
<http://aryeh.name/spec/editcommands/autoimplementation.html>, and the last
column should really be centered.

Customized alignment for some cells is desirable in possibly even a majority of
tables.  For instance, when I looked at the first Wikipedia article I thought
of ([[HTML5]]), I found two tables, and both had cells with their alignment
overridden (using style, though, not align).

The major use-case is actually centering columns, though, not cells, so
actually <col align> would be the most useful thing.  I don't know when you'd
want to align individual cells and not a whole column, not counting when you
want to make just the header different.

It's quite uncommon to want to change font color/size/face of a particular run
of text, make marquees, make text large, align individual paragraphs, or make
colored horizontal rules, other than in cases where there are semantic elements
like <h#>.  So those are all different.

<tt> is a common need, but you can just use <code> instead, so it's not really
needed.  <center> is also a special case because it can't actually be done in
CSS -- e.g., I don't know of any way to do this in CSS, such that all children
will be centered without you having to modify each child's style individually:

data:text/html,<!doctype html>
<center>
<div style=width:10em;height:2em;background:blue></div>
<div style=width:5em;height:2em;background:red></div>
</center>

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Received on Friday, 18 March 2011 16:48:54 UTC