use of colgroup

[Daniel Doman]

I am printout two large tables that should line up. I mark each td
statement with the appropriate width so things look pretty and I use a
cols= statement in my table declaration to help out the browser. I'd like
to get rid of all the width statements in all of the td statements using
Colgroup, but its not clear to me if this is well supported by all but the
most recent browsers or that this is what it is for.

If I use Colgroup and specify the column widths for all my fields, I will
send a bunch less data down and simplify things, but I just want to make
sure that this is a well supported feature.

Also, the docs that I read show a colgroup statement followed by one or
more COL statements. There doesn't appear to be any /Colgroup statement
required. Is this because the colgroup is supposed to appear before any TR
statements and that closure is implicit?

dan

 

[Adrienne]

I am printout two large tables that should line up. I mark each td
statement with the appropriate width so things look pretty and I use a
cols= statement in my table declaration to help out the browser. I'd
like to get rid of all the width statements in all of the td
statements using Colgroup, but its not clear to me if this is well
supported by all but the most recent browsers or that this is what it
is for.

If I use Colgroup and specify the column widths for all my fields, I
will send a bunch less data down and simplify things, but I just want
to make sure that this is a well supported feature.

Also, the docs that I read show a colgroup statement followed by one or
more COL statements. There doesn't appear to be any /Colgroup statement
required. Is this because the colgroup is supposed to appear before any
TR statements and that closure is implicit?

dan

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html#h-11.2.4

 

[Daniel Doman]

Yes - this is what I read. Its still not clear to me.

1) Unlink a lot of other elements there is no closure e.g.. no </colgroup>
but I assume this means that its implied by the first TH or TR statement,
but is this well supported by all browsers for the past few years?

 

[Mark Parnell]

Yes - this is what I read. Its still not clear to me.

What is what you read?

Oh, you mean http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html#h-11.2.4 that
Adrienne pointed you to? Please quote the text you are replying to.

1) Unlink a lot of other elements there is no closure e.g.. no
</colgroup>

There is, but it is optional.

but I assume this means that its implied by the first TH
or TR statement, but is this well supported by all browsers for the
past few years?

What are you actually trying to achieve? Is this actually tabular data? If
not, then http://www.allmyfaqs.com/faq.pl?Tableless_layouts would be a good
place to start.

 

[Daniel Doman]

Nah - It really is brute force tables and not just layouts. I did reread
what she pointed to and finally understood and have successfully
implemented. As for CSS layouts, I've found that some functions like
scrollverflow are still not well supported. Safari didn't support it at
all until the recent 1.0 beta so I am going to stay clear for a while
longer before counting on that. As it is, my ex-wife is still running the
OSX 10.2 version of IE (which really sucks) and hasn't even installed
Safari.When the CSS layouts work, they are lovely, but there are too many
older browsers out there.

Thanks