- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 01:01:07 +0200
On Nov 6, 2006, at 09:36, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: > On Nov 4, 2006, at 1:53 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote: >> >> None of Opera 9.02, Firefox 2.0, IE7 and Safari 2.0.4 implement >> colspan="0" as specified in HTML 4.01. Trident, Presto and WebKit >> at least agree on what to do with it: they treat it like colspan="1". >> >> I suggest that only positive integers be conforming and that non- >> conforming values be treated as 1. >> ... > > I know browser vendors have had a long time to implement this, but > still, I think giving up on it would be a shame. The number of rows > or columns in a table is often rather expensive to calculate ahead > of time. As long as this has to be done to calculate the rowspan= > or colspan= of header cells, this can substantially increase the > time an application takes to generate a table. For the browser to > interpret colspan="0" or rowspan="0" instead would both make life > easier for application authors, and make such pages faster overall. That won't work for colspan='0' and explicit column groups, because you'd still have to calculate the column groups and output them before you output any rows. What Gecko does with the last cell on a row having colspan="0" rowspan="1" might be marginally useful for your use case, but I don't think this particular case is worth breaking the interop that now exist between Trident, Presto and WebKit. If the colspan="0" cell is not the last on a row in Gecko, the results are weird. With colspan="0" and rowspan greater than 1, the rules for finding free slots for later cells fall apart. How would you spec the handling of the following table? <table> <tr><td colspan="0" rowspan='2'>1</td></tr> <tr><td>2</td></tr> </table> The Gecko treatment is just weird. So I stand by my suggestion that colspan="0" be non-conforming and be treated as colspan="1" by UAs. rowspan='0' is interoperable as defined in HTML 4.01, so no reason to change that one. It doesn't cause weirdness, because the search for available cell slots works horizontally and rowspan='0' extends cells vertically. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Received on Wednesday, 8 November 2006 15:01:07 UTC