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Bug 12939 - The <COL> group used to be defined as a very useful to represent tabular data. Among the various things needed for tabular data perusing is the data alignment. In v4.01 there is an "align" and a "char" attribute that make the <COL> attribute very useful t
Summary: The <COL> group used to be defined as a very useful to represent tabular data...
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LC1 HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-06-11 08:43 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-08-12 20:23 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-06-11 08:43:33 UTC 
Specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/
Section: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#top

Comment:
The <COL> group used to be defined as a very useful to represent tabular data.

Among the various things needed for tabular data perusing is the data
alignment.

In v4.01 there is an "align" and a "char" attribute that make the <COL>
attribute very useful to programmers, even if only implemented in MS IE. In
this way a programmer defines the column rendering stuff *once and before* the
data itself gets generated.

Now in v5-draft there's nothing at all, only standard attributes and the span.

In my opinion, the <COL> tags makes very little sense, if any, without the
rendering attributes.

In absence of the rendering attributes in the COL tag, the rendering
instructions need to be repeated on a per table cell basis, thus creating HTML
bloat, useless extra complexity in the document and, finally, a major penalty
in the rendering effectiveness.


Posted from: 151.75.227.170
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.91 Safari/534.30
Comment 1 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-08-04 05:05:53 UTC 
mass-moved component to LC1
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-08-12 20:23:23 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: Browsers are moving away from implementing that legacy presentational attribute. Also, it's presentational — this problem is better solved in CSS than in HTML.