Re: Table and block

About such values for the display as table-row, table-row-group, table-cell,
table-caption...
Can I say that they are block-level elements?

--
The best regards
  Ruslan Fayzrakhmanov



On 25 November 2010 19:56, Anton Prowse <prowse@moonhenge.net> wrote:

> On 22/11/2010 18:04, Ruslan Fayzrakhmanov wrote:
>
>> I would like to ask you about the types of the visualized DOM-tree
>> elements. At the http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html (Visual
>> Formatting model), it is written that there are 2 types of boxes: inline
>> box and block box. What about tables? Table, is it a block?
>>
>
> The current version of the spec[1] contains a lot of not-the-whole-truth
> statements like that.  (Work is in progress to tidy this up a bit.)
>
> The terminology in the spec has historically been rather muddled, and so
> things are a little more complex than your question supposes.  Using the
> most recently proposed terminology, the situation is as follows.
>
> An element E with CSS display:table or display:inline-table generates a
> "principal box" known as a "table wrapper box", which contains none or more
> "caption boxes" (generated by child elements of E with
> display:table-caption) and one "table box".  In CSS21 these caption boxes,
> and the table box, are all block-level boxes.  The term "block-level"
> describes the outwards behaviour of the box.
>
> The caption boxes happen to also be "block container boxes" (as they are
> now called), which means that they either contain only other block-level
> boxes or only inline-level content.  The term "block container" describes
> the inwards behaviour of the box.
>
> Now, boxes which are both block-level and block containers are called
> "block boxes".  (Think divs and paragraphs in their typical guises.) Hence
> caption boxes are block boxes.  But what about the table wrapper box and the
> table box?
>
> Well, the table wrapper box is either block-level or inline-level depending
> on whether the element E has display:table or display:inline-table,
> respectively.  In the former case the table wrapper box is a block box, and
> in the latter case the table wrapper box is an inline-level block container
> box, which behaves almost identically to the principal box generated by an
> element with display:inline-block.
>
> The table box has a special inwards behaviour that allows it to contain
> rows, columns, cells etc.  Hence a table box is quite different from other
> types of boxes in CSS21.  Its name is simply "table box" and its outwards
> behaviour is always block-level, sitting (alongside any captions) inside the
> table wrapper box.
>
> The most common source of confusion in all this is the fact that an element
> with display:table or display:inline-table generates /multiple/ boxes in the
> first place.  (That doesn't happen with display:block/inline-block/inline
> for example, although it does happen with display:list-item sometimes if a
> marker box is generated.)  Going hand-in-hand with this is the fact that
> there do not exist distinct document elements for the table wrapper box and
> the table box (and again nor for a list-item box and the marker box).  Hence
> there's only one element to target using CSS... and so what happens is the
> only thing that /can/ happen, namely that some CSS properties "applied" to
> an element with display:table or display:inline-table affect the table
> wrapper box (for instance 'position', 'float' and of course 'display'
> itself) whilst other properties affect the table box and not the table
> wrapper box (for instance 'color').
>
> The terminology (and to a certain extent the behaviour) surrounding tables
> is still under consideration.  What I've been using here comes from the
> latest public Editor's Draft[2], but note that even that still has several
> flaws in its terminology usage in section 17.4.  These should be ironed out
> in due course.
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/tables.html#model
> [2] http://www.w3.org/Style/css2-updates/css2/tables.html#model
>
> Cheers,
> Anton Prowse
> http://dev.moonhenge.net
>