- From: Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@MIT.EDU>
- Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 19:03:28 -0500
- To: ernestcline@mindspring.com
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
> 7) If a child T of a 'table-row' element P is not a 'table-cell' element,
> an object corresponding to a 'table-cell' element will be generated
> between P and T. [If the child T has associated with it rowspan
> and colspan information, this object contains only this child, and
> the object shall have the same spanning information as the child.
> Otherwise,] this object spans all consecutive siblings of T that are
> not 'table-cell' elements [which do not have associated spanning
> information.]
This will make implementing this part of the spec (which is already pretty
painful), even more painful... but yes, it may resolve the problem on the
table.
Of course going down this road and just declaring that spanning information is
part of the document structure, not of the layout does preclude ever having a
way to set spanning information via CSS (because then you would be back to
square 1). That may be fine, all things considered.
> However, even without such a change, I would make the
> argument that if selectors such as :column(an+b) were to
> be supported, it will need to be done in a way so that the column
> referred to would not be affected by the setting of CSS properties.
Right. That's the basic problem we're looking at.
> This implies that if it were to be extended so as to be able to serve
> for a generic table, that instead of having anonymous table-cells
> span multiple children, they should only span a single child
> (including possibly anonymous inline boxes
How would this make the situation any better for a "generic table"? The column
still depends on CSS properties, no?
> Then to use the list from Ian's blog, I think you would be able to know
> which column an element belongs to at Stage 2 instead of Stage 3
Rather it makes stage 2 self-referential because styles of nodes start to
depend on the styles of their siblings....
> Only those pages dependent upon the generation of
> anonymous table-cell objects will be affected and that doesn't bother
> me very much if columns can finally be addressed by CSS.
I agree that that's a small price to pay if we act before such styling becomes
widespread.
I'd be curious to hear what Ian thinks of this proposal.
Boris
--
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The
question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough
to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is
that it is not crazy enough.
-- Niels Bohr
Received on Saturday, 13 December 2003 19:06:22 UTC