


From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:10:52 +0000 (UTC)
To: ray whitfield <raylwhitfield@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0506282359240.29439@dhalsim.dreamhost.com>

On Tue, 28 Jun 2005, ray whitfield wrote:
> I really do not understand the resistance or claims of difficulty 
> related to adding additional properties to the col and colgroup 
> elements. UAs already have to support background-color, border, width 
> and visibility; all of these except background effect the cell size. 
> Determining the inheritance of these properties has not proved too 
> difficult to implement nor required additional clarification in the CSS 
> specification.

Yeah. You know why? Because the spec doesn't define how it works. And thus 
every user agent does it slightly differently.

The problem is that 'color' is an inherited property. Inheritance is done 
before layout (it has to be, since the layout depends on inheritance). 
You don't know what is a column until you've done the layout. To make 
'color''s inheritance depend on the layout thus doesn't fit CSS's model.

This isn't to say that the working group isn't aware of the problem and 
looking for a solution. But nobody has yet given a solution that is easily 
implementable in the CSS model. (What IE does is not implement a large 
chunk of the CSS model, thus bypassing the problem, and losing an 
important set of features.)

Received on Wednesday, 29 June 2005 00:11:04 GMT
