Re: [CSS21] unresolved issue (was: Re: [CSS21] new WD and last call)

On Tuesday 07 November 2006 17:17, Peter Sorotokin wrote:
> Adobe Digital Editions (
> http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/digitaleditions/ - Windows beta
> available) uses XHTML mark-up and follows XHTML rules for tables
> defined in CSS 2.1 (the file illustrating it is enclosed, unzip to
> look inside). Naturally, we would not want rules to be changed now.
>
> Peter
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of Anne van Kesteren
> Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2006 7:08 AM
> To: www-style@w3.org
> Subject: [CSS21] unresolved issue (was: Re: [CSS21] new WD and last
> call)
[...]
> The WG never replied to
> http://www.w3.org/mid/op.tfl2fqwu64w2qv@id-c0020.oslo.opera.com and I
> also
> can't find it in the list of resolved issues.

Seems we indeed overlooked that one. Sorry.

But it also seems you got your answer :-)

We'll try not to forget the comment this time round. Meanwhile, to give 
one possible answer:

There are differences in semantics between HTML and XHTML, including in 
the rendering semantics. The special rules for HTML have historical 
reasons, usually to make it possible for the implementers in the mid 
90's to adopt style sheets in browsers that didn't treat HTML as a 
tree-structured document. XHTML, on the other hand, is supposed to be 
as much as possible a generic XML format.

The way browsers sometimes render table cells on top of other cells 
seems to be such a historical accident. Probably a bug that was on the 
"to do" list to be fixed, but wasn't fixed fast enough. It is not wise 
to change the rules for HTML now (most people already know how to work 
around the bugs and incompatibilities anyway), but there is also no 
reason to copy the bug to new document formats.



Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos                               W3C/ERCIM
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Thursday, 16 November 2006 11:36:06 UTC