Scripsit Adrienne Boswell:
Not every table needs a footer.
Most tables don't. Actually I think I've never seen a living sample of a
table with a footer on a web page, if "footer" means something marked up
with <tfoot>. By "living", I mean anything else than pure examples in
HTML tutorials and things like that. - But I've used the web just a
little over 15 years, and I have not studied the source code of every
table that visually contains something that might be a footer.
If you have maybe 10
records (rows), you might not need a footer. However, if you have 50
rows, you might want to have a footer so the user knows what column
they are looking at when they have scrolled to the bottom of the
table.
What _is_ a table footer, anyway? Your interpretation of a footer as
essentially yet another table header, just positioned below the data
rows and not above them, is a plausible one. But it's somewhat odd,
since it's really just presentational then. If it's essentially a copy
of a table header, then what we should really have is a single header
with some styling that causes it to be presented twice (or several
times) in different places, under some conditions. Another
interpretation is that a table footer is more or less a legend or a
description of notations used in the table cells, or something like
that.
I'd say that we need special justification to use <tfoot>, instead of
needing any particular justification to not use it.
