Re: [Tutorial Feedback]

Hi Sandy,

Thanks for your feedback. Great question!

Indeed you’re right but the interesting thing is that HTML allows to omit the start and end tag of colgroup in certain circumstances. 

> A colgroup element’s start tag may be omitted if the first thing inside the colgroup element is a col element, and if the element is not immediately preceded by another colgroup element whose end tag has been omitted. (It can’t be omitted if the element is empty.)

https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/tabular-data.html#the-colgroup-element

So the code that the browser sees from the simple <col> is actually <colgroup><col></colgroup>. 

That said, we should probably make it more obvious in the tutorial. 

Eric

Sent from my iPhone

> On 26. Apr 2019, at 19:51, Sandy Feldman <sandy@sandyfeldman.com> wrote:
> 
> hey WAI editors,
> 
> I am plowing through Tables with irregular headers
> 
> https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/tables/irregular/
> 
> There is a code snippet that reads
> 
> <table>
>   <col>
>   <colgroup span="2"></colgroup>
>   <colgroup span="2"></colgroup>
> 
> https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/tabular-data.html#the-col-element
> 
> says that col is a child of colgroup. The examples on that page have <colgroup> <col>
> 
> Is the <col> before the <colgroup> putting Mars and Venus and everything that follows into one column? Or ...?
> 
> thanks for your help,
> 
> -- 
> Sandy
> 
> 
>