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brianiac (4158)

brianiac
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Journal of brianiac (4158)

Tuesday March 14, 2006

02:37 PM

Tables require a TBODY

[ #28993 ]

Special note to the VisualStudio Team, the IE team, and all web coders: Check the spec, the table tag *does not* contain tr tags, and hasn't since 1999! Tables must contain tbody tags (and optionally thead and tfoot tags), and that's where the tr tags go.

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Don't be so sure... (Score:1)

by jk2addict (4946)

While I agree that the DTD is somewhat ambigous about it, a little further down the page doesn't agree with your findings... http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/tables.html#h-11.2.5 [w3.org]
- Ambiguous? (Score:1)
  
  by brianiac (4158)
  
  <!ELEMENT TABLE - - (CAPTION?, (COL*|COLGROUP*), THEAD?, TFOOT?, TBODY+)>
  
  That doesn't look ambiguous at all. If it's wrong (as suggested by the example, and the XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 DTDs), why has it never been fixed? I mean, that is a major technical error.
- Ah... (Score:1)
  
  by brianiac (4158)
  
  Start tag optional. *Sheesh*
But TBODY is optional... (Score:2)

by bart (450)

Checking the same page, you can see the following for TBODY:

<!ELEMENT TBODY O O (TR)+ -- table body --> Start tag: optional, End tag: optional

That would appear to mean, if I don't read it wrongly, that you can drop explicit mention of TBODY, so that embedded TR tags are in an implied TBODY, if you don't mention one.
- Re:But TBODY is optional... (Score:1)
  
  by brianiac (4158)
  
  I thought that XHTML 1.0's reliance on the HTML 4.0 spec was a problem here, but C.11. #2 seems to address this specifically:
  
  User agents that access XHTML documents served as Internet media types text/xml, application/xml, or application/xhtml+xml can also use the XML DOM. Elements and attributes will be returned in lower-case. Also, some XHTML elements may or may not appear in the object tree because they are optional in the content model (e.g. the tbody element [emphasis added] within table). This occur
Bug. (Score:2)

by Juerd (1796)

It's a bug in the spec. (And the bug is not present in xhtml's dtd.)