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Does Firefox not understand COLGROUP and COL?
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Subject Author Date
Does Firefox not understand COLGROUP and COL? David Stone 06-06-2006
Posted by Eric Lindsay on June 8, 2006, 10:42 pm
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I just tried doing a table with colgroup and col and a few other things
I had read about on the W3C site, only to discover that they didn't
appear to work in Safari either. Given up in disgust.

Gone back to using align="left" on the th elements and align="right" on
the td elements, since the W3 validator doesn't complain about that.
Since I usually generate a table with a shell script, having the
attributes in the html is easier than worrying about whether any
specific style sheet has the style I want for a particular table. I only
have a half dozen very simple tables on my site, so using simple markup
seems a lot easier than sticking in theader and tbody and that sort of
stuff.

--
http://www.ericlindsay.com

Posted by Alan J. Flavell on June 9, 2006, 3:25 am
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On Fri, 9 Jun 2006, Eric Lindsay wrote:

> I just tried doing a table with colgroup and col and a few other things
> I had read about on the W3C site, only to discover that they didn't
> appear to work in Safari either.

I think you need to be more discerning in your evaluation of "does not
appear to work". col and colgroup are specified to do quite a number
of things in HTML, and to have a small number of properties applied to
them in CSS. MSIE implements some extra CSS properties that it isn't
supposed to; Mozilla fails to support some HTML attributes that,
according to the spec, it ought to. So it's not ideal, but it isn't
that col and colgroup don't work.

> Gone back to using align="left" on the th elements and align="right"
> on the td elements, since the W3 validator doesn't complain about
> that.

That's an unfortunate way to put it. The validator is only calling
attention to features of what the specification says. It would be
better to follow the specification, as far as possible, rather than
merely doing things because of what the validator does or doesn't
"complain about".

But yes, alignment attributes are still available on table cells, even
in "strict" HTML. That can tend to bloat the HTML, though, if you
have a lot of it.


Posted by David E. Ross on June 9, 2006, 7:28 pm
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David Stone wrote:
>
>> Been trying to specify text alignment within specific
>> columns in an html 4 strict page. According to the
>> w3c specs,
>
> Never mind - after poking around the bugzilla pages, it appears
> to be the case that NONE of the Mozilla-based browsers implement
> COLGROUP and COL as per html 4.01 specs. Given that the problems
> I enountered were raised in a bug report several years ago, and are
> still not fixed, I'm going to assume that they likely never will be.
>
> This is one of the things where IE follows the standard, and
> Mozilla/Firefox/etc don't.
>
> So if you want entries in a column to be centred, and you want
> that to be rendered in Mozilla-based browsers, you have to
> apply the alignment to each cell individually _regardless_ of
> whether you use html/css or just plain html.
>
> The next time someone tells me I should be standards-compliant,
> I think I shall just blow a big fat raspberry at them :P

For those who might be interested, it's bug #915. See
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=915>.

--

David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

Concerned about someone (e.g., Pres. Bush) snooping
into your E-mail? Use PGP.
See my <http://www.rossde.com/PGP/>

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