problem with <col>

Hi,

I am using the <col> tag to set the class attribute of each column of a table.
My purpose is to alternate background colors in successive columns to make it
easier to look at the content of each single column. 

Initially, the <col> tags were placed by Amaya between the <table> and the 
<tbody> tags. Unfortunately, this resulted in Amaya showing as many empty 
lines at the beginning of the table as there are <col> tags. Surprisingly 
enough, each of these empty lines showed a one pixel wide background the 
color of which corresponded to the color associated with the class of a column.
In addition, the background color of the columns of the main part of the table
remained unchanged (i.e. the document background color). See
http://cuisung.unige.ch/garbage/991109.html for an illustration.

When I moved the <col> tags manually within the <tbody> section, Amaya
didn't display anymore the empty lines at the beginning of the table, but
still didn't take into account the class information to change the background
of the columns.

I should mention that, in both cases, the table was displayed correctly in
Internet Explorer 5.

The problem I described above applies to both Solaris 2.5 and Win98 binary 
releases of Amaya 2.2 (in both cases the display is a true color display).

From looking at the HTML 4 specification, it is unclear to me whether the
<col> tags have to be in one of the <thead>, <tbody> or <tfoot> sections
of a table, or outside these sections, e.g. just after the <table> tag.
My understanding is that <col> and <colgroup> tags could be anywhere
between the <table> and </table> tags. Other opinions?

Peace,

Bertrand Ibrahim.
--------------------------------------------
Bertrand.Ibrahim@cui.unige.ch
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/eao/www/Bertrand.html