RE: HTML vs. CSS on the <table>

> [Original Message]
> From: <Matthew.van.Eerde@hbinc.com>
>  
> > As Ernest Cline wrote in thread "Re: Styling table columns--why so 
> > limited?" (Message-ID: <410-22004323023428187@mindspring.com>), the 
> > problem is that the 'display' property is used to designate the COL 
> > element as table column and the very same property is used to toggle 
> > rendering of the element on/off (display: none). So any logic that 
> > depends on special values of 'display' property (like 'table-column' 
> > or 'table-cell') cannot really work (setting display:none to a COL 
> > element would remove *that* element from the table structure but it 
> > would leave all the respective 'table-cell' elements behind. If any 
> > cell had colspan or rowspan for multiple cells, expect serious 
> > problems). I'm afraid that there isn't a way to solve this using 
> > CSS2 model for tables.
> > 
> > If tables required empty placeholder cells after rowspan/colspan 
> > there might be some way to handle this pretty nicely with CSS. As 
> > long as table is "missing" elements, there's no way CSS could handle 
> >   this issue.
>
> what about
> grid#example cell[columns=4],
> grid#example cell[rows=2]
> { display: none; }
>
> This would hide all the cells whose columns attribute was exactly "4" or
> whose rows attribute were exactly "2"

Now you are talking about something completely different, how to handle
a sparse table in CSS as opposed to a dense table.  Dealing with that
in CSS is going to require considerably more than what you've got here.
CSS might benefit from a method of handling sparse tables, but 
you'll need to define display properties for the sparse counterparts of
the dense table elements, define how they interact with other display
types, et cetera.

Sparse tables are certainly a chicken and egg type situation in that
implementation will need both markup and presentation defined for it
before it can be used, but until they are available, I doubt if there will
be much demand for them as they can be simulated with existing
markup and style.

Received on Wednesday, 31 March 2004 14:24:18 UTC