Re: table row order invariance vs. incremental layout efficiency (was Re: Specifying intrinsic width and table layout behavior)

On Saturday 2006-09-16 10:36 +0100, David Woolley wrote:
> 
> > the constraints of Web-compatibility) requires doing two passes over the
> > table, the first for non-column-spanning cells and the second for
> 
> Are you sure you mean two, rather than three; don't you need to an additional
> pass to actually render the text into the finally chosen width?

I'm discussing intrinsic width calculation; rendering at the final
column widths, if they change, is another pass.  However, with
incremental rendering of long tables, they may remain constant across
many of the updates.

> Also, other than that it doesn't require author education to enable, does
> this really gain you much compared with table-layout: fixed?  In fact, as
> it is a change in algorithm, won't you still have the author education
> problem that I suspect is the main reason that table-layout: fixed is
> almost never used, as you will need to retain the current mode as default.

No, since both options are within the constraints of Web-compatibility.
Some browsers currently do one and some the other.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >
           Technical Lead, Layout & CSS, Mozilla Corporation