Inheritance of column attributes

The current draft says "Since the COL and COLGROUP elements have no
content, they are not suitable for setting other style properties than
borders."

I don't think this is acceptable.  CSS should specify that TD and TH
elements inherit from both the SGML hierarchy (TABLE, THEAD|TBODY|TFOOT,
TR) *and* from the COLGROUP and COL elements defining the column in
which the cell occurs.  The browser is already going to have to do the
necessary work to trace that inheritance in order to get rules right, so
we may as well allow the stylesheet author to use it as well.  Styling
of columns seems to me to be at least as useful as styling of rows.  My
own inclination would be to take column as "more specific" than row, for
resolving conflicts, but either is OK so long as the spec says one or
the other.

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
phone:	217-384-8589			  fax:	217-384-8550
internet mail:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com

Received on Monday, 22 January 1996 16:24:12 UTC