[CSS21] does 'text-decoration' propagate into tables?

Section 16.3.1 says that text-decoration on blocks is propagated to
block-level in-flow descendants.  I'm trying to figure out what this
means for whether text-decoration on an element outside a table is
propagated into the contents of the table.

(The wording in the confidential editor's draft is rather different,
but doesn't make much of a difference on this question.)

As far as I can tell, CSS 2.1 never defines the term "in-flow".

If "in-flow" is intended to refer to the definition of "normal
flow", then tables are not in-flow.

On the other hand, if in-flow means "not absolutely positioned or
floated" (which I think is how it is sometimes used), then tables
are in-flow.


Separate from the question of what the spec currently says is the
matter of what it should say.  Currently WebKit does not propagate
text-decorations to tables but Gecko does.  However, we (Gecko)
might need to change our behavior for Web-compatibility reasons,
since our switch to the HTML5 parsing algorithm means that now
inline elements are more likely to contain tables accidentally.
(See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=572713 .)

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Wednesday, 20 October 2010 00:57:22 UTC