[Bug 13174] New: Allow block elements inside TH, maybe add new THCAPTION element

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13174

           Summary: Allow block elements inside TH, maybe add new
                    THCAPTION element
           Product: HTML WG
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: PC
        OS/Version: Windows NT
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson)
        AssignedTo: ian@hixie.ch
        ReportedBy: mtanalin@yandex.ru
         QAContact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: mike@w3.org, public-html-wg-issue-tracking@w3.org,
                    public-html@w3.org


In XHTML 1.0, block elements inside TH elements was allowed.

In HTML5, only phrasing content is allowed inside TH:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/tabular-data.html#the-th-element

This is bad in some cases, and forces developers to use TD instead of TH when
the cell actually contains _heading_ content. Using TD instead of TH for
heading content is harmful as for semantics.

For example:

<th>
    <dl>
        <dt>Actual header</dt>
        <dd>Additional content that, by visual design,
        cannot be represented as a separate table cell</dd>
    </dl>
</th>

Its very questionable that heading content cannot contain blocks at all
according to common sense. However, if necessary, new THCAPTION element could
be added to the HTML standard to resolve the semantic issue:

<th>
    <dl>
        <dt><thcaption>Real header</thcaption></dt>
        <dd>Additional content that, by visual design,
        cannot be represented as a separate table cell</dd>
    </dl>
</th>

Thus, user agents (that ones that care about such semantics) would treat
THCAPTION content as actual heading content of the TH, and all other content of
the TH could be treated as non-heading content (as inside TD).

Thanks.

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Received on Thursday, 7 July 2011 17:08:45 UTC