TBODY and ROWSPAN

I can't find anything in the HTML 4.0 Recommendation
<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/> says that it's illegal to construct
a table which has a multi-row cell which spans more than one TBODY,
like so:

    <table border="1">
      <tbody>
	<tr>
	  <td rowspan="2">foo</td>
	  <td>bar</td>
	</tr>
      </tbody>
      <tbody>
	<tr>
	  <td>baz</td>
	</tr>
      </tbody>
    </table>

I think this violates the spirit of the TBODY element (one could make
a slightly weaker case against multi-column cells which span more than
one COLGROUP), and if one of the subdivisions involved is a TFOOT, the
results could be disastrous.  Is this sort of thing supposed to be a
no-no?  The table validates according to the HTML 4.0 DTD, but then so
does a table with overlapping cells, which is explicitly stated in
section 11.2.6 to be an error.
					John T. Whelan
					whelan@iname.com
					http://www.slack.net/~whelan/

Received on Tuesday, 29 September 1998 14:16:15 UTC