TABLEs in HTML4.0

I wonder about a few things concerning HTML tables. 
I hope someone would enlighten me.

1. The TFOOT element must come before the TBODY. The motivation is 
faster rendering. 
  Problem: It consititutes a severe backward compatibility problem
  with HTML 3.2. HTML 3.2 browsers will show the rows of the TFOOT before 
 the rows of TBODY.
   Authors should take this in mind.

2. The (deprecated) align attribute in the TABLE element.
 It doesn't looks from the  spec as
well as the HTML 3.2 spec like floating but more like 
 the "text-align" of headings H1...H6 or P (paragraphs). On the 
 other hand it is implemented as floating by the popular 
graphical browsers. Did these browsers got the HTML 3.2 spec wrong,
or I did? (they probably implemented tables, before there was a 
 table spec o begin with)

3. The optionality of end tags of TFOOT and THEAD is a big mess and 
cannot be defined in the DTD. Wouldn't have it been less confusing 
to make them required? 

4. The chapter on tables in the spec. is Chapter 11. Is 
that intentional? :-)

Nir Dagan
email: dagan@upf.es
URL: http://www.econ.upf.es/%7Edagan/

Received on Monday, 2 March 1998 03:12:29 UTC