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Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/tabular-data.html Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#the-table-element Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#the-table-element Referrer: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/ Comment: Allow col without colgroup in the content model (like tr is allowed without tbody) Posted from: 90.230.218.37 User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_2) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.116 Safari/537.36 OPR/21.0.1432.48 (Edition Next)
See https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=25478 - AFAICT <tbody> and <colgroup> are basically equivalent so they should be consistent in the content model.
This would require substantial changes to the table processing models. What's the value to doing this? It needs to be high enough to warrant the cost.
The processing model could just infer the column group when it's missing. I don't see that as being substantial changes, but maybe I'm missing something? The value is that authors don't have to create the <colgroup> element in DOM/XHTML when they only care about the <col>s, which used to be valid per HTML4/XHTML 1.0. The downside is that it's more complicated to write scripts and stylesheets that support both table+colgroup+col and table+col.
The changes needed for this are: - we'd have to redefine 'column group', either to allow implicit ones, or to have some new concept for a <col>-corresponding column with a group - forming a table would need to learn to navigate around <col> elements - the column group headers logic might need reworking to handle scope=colgroup without <colgroup> Since this wouldn't help for text/html documents, it seems of minimal value.
Yeah I don't disagree with the low value. I think it is unfortunate that <tbody> and <colgroup> are inconsistent, but I guess there are more important things to focus on. :-|
I agree that it's unfortunate that <tbody> and <colgroup> are inconsistent, but I'm finding it hard to justify making this change given the cost:benefit ratio. I'm marking this WONTFIX, but if there's a win here that I'm missing, don't hesitate to reopen it.