Re: Column text color

Ernest Cline wrote:
> Could you give a reference to that blog entry?

Sure thing.  <http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1070385285&count=1>

Note that that's what kicked off this thread, by the way.... (if you 
look at Sandy's original post at 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2003Dec/0015.html).

> Because I don't see that I agree with that statement, at least not for
> an HTML- like table structure where at the time a specific table cell
> is encountered, one could know which row, row-group, column, and
> column-group it is in as the start tag for those elements have already
> been encountered.

Except some of them could have style applied to them, in which case, all 
bets are off.  For example:

<table>
<tr>
   <td rowspan="2" style="display: block">row 1, col 1</td>
   <td>row 1, col 2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
   <td>row 2, col ???</td>
</tr>
</table>

Which column should the "row 2, col ???" cell render in?  I believe it 
should render in column 1 (and does in Mozilla and Opera; IE does not 
support changing the display of "td" and Konqueror 3.0.3 simply fails to 
show that table cell, so testing with them is of little use here).  If 
the display:block rule is removed it should render in column 2.

> Now if that were not the case, or if CSS were used to decide which
> row or column a cell was in

Like in my example?

 > but for table models like the one used by HTML,
> I fail to see the impossibility.

For a CSS browser (as the current crop of browsers are) the 
impossibility is very real....

> Whether this possibility is a desirability is a separate question
> and perhaps the blog entry will point out why such an approach
> would be undesirable.

No, the blog entry in fact begs for people to come up with a decent way 
of supporting this, after listing the technical reasons why it's not 
supported at the moment.

-Boris

Received on Friday, 12 December 2003 13:52:07 UTC