Re: problem with <col>

Hi,

In-reply-to: Your message of Thu, 11 Nov 1999 15:20:23 +0100."
             <0FL100DM3EI16S@cuimail.unige.ch> 
> 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.

That is a small bug. We omitted to give a zero sized height to <col> elements 
in
the P schema.

> 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.

HTML 3.2 tables are already complex to support, HTML 4. are twice more complex.
What is done in the current Amaya releases is the parsing and the editing of 
HTML 4 tables, but not all the rendering. As we have a limited manpower, we try
to manage the urgency. We can take time to work on HTML 4 tables but we didn't
receive requests for that until now.

> 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?

According to the DTD declaration
<!ELEMENT TABLE - -
     (CAPTION?, (COL*|COLGROUP*), THEAD?, TFOOT?, TBODY+)>

<col> and <colgroup> tags cannot be children of <thead>, <tbody> or <tfoot>
and must appear before the <thead>, <tbody> or <tfoot>.
> 
> Peace,
> 
> Bertrand Ibrahim.
> --------------------------------------------
> Bertrand.Ibrahim@cui.unige.ch
> http://cuiwww.unige.ch/eao/www/Bertrand.html
> 

  Irene.

Received on Friday, 12 November 1999 04:38:46 UTC