Re: Column text color

Chris Moschini wrote:
> The least drastic method is:
> 
> 1) Modify nth-of-type( n ) selectors to account for colspan. That is, if I say
> td:nth-of-type(3), then it counts 3 columns over in the Table, not 3 TD tags.

This fails to address the basic issue Ian's blog entry points out, which 
is that at style resolution time you don't know anything about columns, 
colspans, or the table structure.

> 2) Allow columns to be introduced explicitly via CSS, probably as a pseudo-class
> - such as td:column( n ) - and let this pseudo-element do the proper counting that
> accounts for colspan.

Same issue.

The problem is not that you can't select columns.  Methods to do that 
can be added, as you pointed out.  The problem is that the CSS 
processing model simply does not handle this situation.  It could 
perhaps be modified to do so, but that's a much more fundamental change 
than simply adding a new selector and may well require significant 
rewrites of all existing CSS implementations (it would violate one of 
the existing fundamental invariants, which is that style resolution does 
not depend on the results of said resolution).

-Boris

Received on Friday, 12 December 2003 12:20:03 UTC