Re: Table Backgrounds

At 2001-06-29T17:33-0400, fantasai wrote:-

> Bernd Mielke wrote:
> >
> > Ian,
> >
> > while you are on it, could you also look how row- and colspans
> > should be treated. Its hard for me to admit it, but I like the
> > way IE6 renders the following snippet.
>
> http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88260
> (the snippet & 2 screenshots)

Aha. I think that IE's rendering is definitely wrong (w.r.t. CSS2, at any
rate), since the cells should allow the columns' backgrounds to show
through, and not simply inherit them. (Incidentally, do people see there
being a use for more sophisticated selectors for table cells, so that it
would be possible to apply styles to the cells of/in a given row or column
rather than the row/column itself?)

I'm also not quite sure about Mozilla's interpretation: with a little
playing, I've convinced myself that it does not let row and column
backgrounds "leak" into the inter-row and inter-column cell spacing
(respectively). CSS2 seems to be fairly unequivocal that the row boxes
cover the *whole* table; it's less strong about columns, but it would seem
peculiarly inconsistent to treat the two differently in this respect.

OTOH, it also says (17.6.1) that the cell spacing is filled with the table
background. The only way I can see to interpret this consistently is to
think of deciding backgrounds under the layered model of 17.5.1 with
collapsed borders, and then "exploding" the table, inserting gaps where
the background of the bottom layer can show through; this, however, would
mean that row and column backgrounds should not appear at all in the cell
spacing - i.e.  each cell should be surrounded on all four sides by the
table background.

Can any of the CSS authors comment on the original intention of the text?


Tim Bagot

Received on Friday, 29 June 2001 18:52:40 UTC