Re: Formal definition of HTML5 (was Re: Version information)

At 04:19 AM 4/17/2007, Dão Gottwald wrote:

>Ian Hickson schrieb:
>>On Tue, 17 Apr 2007, D�o Gottwald wrote:
>>>Ian Hickson schrieb:
>>>>    TBODY can be omitted as a child of TABLE
>>>>    TR can be a child of TABLE
>>>How would that affect the DOM1 tBodies and rows collections?
>>This is defined here:
>>    http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#tbodies
>>    http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#rows
>>...or in the shorter multipage version (these URIs are not stable):
>> 
>>http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-tabular.html#tbodies
>> 
>>http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-tabular.html#rows
>>Let me know if this doesn't address your question.
>
>I thought this would break scripts where the 
>author assumed that tbody is implicitly created, 
>but apparently that assumption is already false 
>today. So the spec is accurate; nothing to worry about ...

Let me see if I understand...

the (whatwg) spec says "Zero or more 
<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#tbody>tbody 
elements, or [...]"

The W3C spec says
"The 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/tables.html#edef-TBODY>TBODY 
start tag is always required except when the 
table contains only one table body and no table 
head or foot sections. The 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/tables.html#edef-TBODY>TBODY 
end tag may always be safely omitted."

But when I look at 
document.getElementById(tableId).firstChild in 
Opera, FF, or IE it is always a <tbody> , even if 
I did not code one there myself. The browser 
inserts if for me. Does this mean those browsers 
are doing it wrong? I rather suspect I'm 
misreading the specs (this is a far simpler 
explanation). But it did rather break a script 
which assumed the <table> remained topologically 
equivalent to the one I had built -- 'til I 
figured out that the browsers invented this tag 
for me (despite my preference to the contrary).

David Dailey
http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/
The first time I discovered this I thought it was 
an IE thing, and I was tempted to fuss, since I 
had not given anyone to make unlicensed 
derivative artwork out of my purely expressive 
original expressions -- (just kidding). 

Received on Tuesday, 17 April 2007 15:45:31 UTC