- From: G. James Berigan <www-html@war-of-the-worlds.org>
- Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2000 13:32:05 -0600
- To: www-html-editor@w3.org
I've been trying to elicit comment about this issue in both www-html@w3.org and comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, but no one seems to be willing to comment on it. I hope you can comment on it or make some kind of official stand on the issue as it impacts a program I'm developing as well as the behavior of MSIE and the development of Mozilla.[1] The issue where TFOOT must precede TBODY has caused some problems with parsing ROWSPAN attributes. Parsers today appear to parse the entire table and then move the TFOOT to the end of the table. This becomes a problem when you have a ROWSPAN in a THEAD that extends beyond the bottom of the TR rows in the THEAD and ROWSPANs in the TFOOT that extend beyond the bottom of the TR rows in the TFOOT. Current browser behavior has the spans past THEAD rows spanning into TFOOT rows and into TBODY rows, as well as spans beyond TFOOT rows into TBODY rows spanning into TBODY. Then, when the TFOOT is moved to the end of the table, you have a mess. I can only see one hard solution to this problem: It needs to be stated that ROWSPANs that extend beyond rowgroup boundaries are illegal markup and that browsers must either stop rowspanning at such boundaries or extend the number of rows in the rowgroup to account for the excessive spanning and not span into other rowgroups below (or disjointedly above). Either change would be in line with the new behavior of ROWSPAN=0 in HTML 4.01. The issues can become extremely hairy when the page then attempts to hide rowgroups with CSS and ECMAscript, including ROWSPANning across TBODY boundaries, which is why I think this restriction needs to be applied to all rowgroups. The CSS/ECMAscript issue may also be a problem for COLSPANning across COLGROUPs, but is not as dire an issue. The sections are (row groups) 11.2.3, (colgroups) 11.2.4.1, and (spanning in general) 11.2.6.1. [1] See <http://www.war-of-the-worlds.org/html/span-vs-group.html>
Received on Wednesday, 9 February 2000 14:32:37 UTC