Re: Inheritance of column attributes

For CSS to adequately express the COL/COLGROUP styling issue, it needs a 
way to address the nth child of an element AND a general way to address 
children of a mutual parent. A hierarchical scheme (similar, say, to 
POSIX filenames) would be ideal, but it would require the browser to 
store a full parse tree for the document. If you really want intelligent 
table styling, use DSSSL (or DSSSL Online, if it suits your purposes.) I 
doubt CSS (especially before level 3) will support this kind of thing.

I would be quite pleased if it did, of course.

Benjamin C. W. Sittler

P.S. How do browser authors feel about handling full parse trees? What's the
     average performance penalty for actually parsing the document using
     a true SGML parser? Any ideas on how to handle parsing before a document
     is completely loaded? (Should heuristics based on existing HTML practice
     be used, or is it simply too unknowable?)

Received on Wednesday, 24 January 1996 18:20:13 UTC