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Re: Proposed: a TN tag to join TH and TD?

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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 13, 2013 2:54PM

2013-06-13 19:43, Duff Johnson wrote:

> So… back to my question… what's the history on this subject (if any) in the HTML world?

The history of HTML tables as a whole is rather simple. Tables were
first drafted in RFC 1942 "HTML Tables" in 1996, when HTML was very
young. A simplified version was incorporated into HTML 3.2, whereas in
HTML 4, the technical content of RFC 1942 was adopted rather directly.
HTML5 proposes to change many details, but the big picture would not
change much.

I cannot find the issue of "dummy" cells, in the sense discussed here,
as appearing in documents about HTML, and I cannot remember it having
been mentioned in discussions about them. Most often, if an empty cell
is seen as a problem, it is seen as presentational problem, e.g. "how do
I make browsers use background color and borders for an empty cell?"

In RFC 1942, the first example of a table has a dummy cell in the upper
left corner, marked up as TH element with empty content. So it was not
seen as a problem:

<TABLE BORDER>
<CAPTION>A test table with merged cells</CAPTION>
<TR><TH ROWSPAN=2><TH COLSPAN=2>Average
<TH ROWSPAN=2>other<BR>category<TH>Misc
<TR><TH>height<TH>weight
<TR><TH ALIGN=LEFT>males<TD>1.9<TD>0.003
<TR><TH ALIGN=LEFT ROWSPAN=2>females<TD>1.7<TD>0.002
</TABLE>

In a sense, such a dummy cell could be seen as a header cell that has
just been left empty. My point is that it could contain some real header
text, for both the rows and the columns. Sometimes, in contexts other
than HTML, such cells have been divided, with a diagonal, so that one
part contains a header for the cells of the first column, the other part
contains a header for the cells of the first row. In the example above,
the first part could contain e.g. the the "Sex", as it described the
cells "males" and "females"; the other part would be more obscure here.

So in this common special case, the "dummy" cell might be seen as not
dummy at all but a fusion of two headers. There just isn't any way
defined for dealing with it that way. Conceivably, the specification
might be changed to allow <th scope="row column">, but then we would
need some way of writing the two headers into one cell. It would be
possible of course, but I reallt cannot tell what might be a natural way.

Yucca