Re: Alternate proposals for ISSUE-83

On Jan 14, 2010, at 4:39 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Jan 2010, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>>
>> It also has a moderately pleasing (to me, at least) parallel with
>> <tbody>, which serves the same purpose of being an optional wrapper  
>> for
>> the body contents of the table.  Styling opportunities with <tbody>  
>> are
>> fewer due to the limitations imposed by the table formatting model,  
>> but
>> it still finds plenty of use in my CSS.  I used it just today to  
>> cleanly
>> apply a border to just the <td>s in the body of a stats table,  
>> avoiding
>> the placeholder <td> in the <thead> (serving just to take up a cell  
>> in
>> the upper-left, as the table had both row and column headers).
>
> I think the parallel with <tbody> might be what is putting some  
> people off
> -- <tbody> has been quite a big pain in the neck for many years, with 
> weird edge cases, parsing oddities, styling difficulties, etc. I'm not
> saying we couldn't do it right, but it certainly isn't trivial.

<tbody> is also different from the proposed <fbody>/<dbody> because it  
is implied when missing. So you can use it as a styling hook even if  
you didn't actually put it in your markup, at least in the text/html  
serialization. I don't think we want to make <fbody> or <dbody>  
implied, though, so they wouldn't have that advantage, and thus I  
think would lose a lot of their value. If you have to remember to do  
something specific and extra to get the styling hook on all <figure>  
and <details> elements, you may as well add a <div>, possibly with a  
special class, to each of them.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Friday, 15 January 2010 01:09:05 UTC