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RE: Help with border on tables

for

From: Jukka Korpela
Date: Dec 14, 2001 2:21AM


Christine Opitz [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] wrote:

> this worked for me, put it within the <table> tag:
> style="border-color: green;"

It may work in some special cases, but generally it has a meaning
that is different from the effect of the nonstandard bordercolor
attribute in HTML. The reason is that the CSS property border-color
affects the border around the <table> _element_, i.e. the table
as a whole, whereas the (browser-specific) HTML attribute bordercolor
affects both that and the borders around individual cells.

These things are fairly difficult, since the table rendering model
in CSS is complicated and it has been implemented just partially in
browsers. There are quite a many technicalities. Moreover, this is
_usually_ not an (essential) accessibility problem, since border coloring
is an esthetic issue; admittedly it may have an impact on the visual
clarity, but most accessibility problems associated with tables are
much more serious. Hence, I'd suggest using the Usenet newsgroup
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets for stylistic questions like
this.
(It has a meta-FAQ at http://css.nu/faq/ciwas-mFAQ.html )

_Some_ attempted solutions to border coloring problems may have essential
accessibility implications. I'm mainly referring to the somewhat tricky
ideas
of simulating borders around cells by using "dummy" cells with no real
content, just the desired color as background color. This may impose
accessibility
problems, since the logical structure of the table is distorted when the
"dummy"
cells are added. It depends on the user agent's way of presenting tables
whether
this matters. It also depends on what, if anything, is used as the "dummy"
content
in "dummy" cells.

The trick of using nested tables - specifically, putting a the content of a
cell inside
an inner single-cell table, using a suitable background color for the outer
cell -
might cause some problems too. I'm afraid not all user agents will silently
treat
a single cell table as a dummy structure, presenting just its content.

I've written some notes on these tricks, and I'm afraid I need
to revise them some day, since I didn't really think about accessibility as
much
as I probably should have:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/cellborder.html

- --
Jukka Korpela
TIEKE Tietoyhteiskunnan kehittamiskeskus ry
Finnish Information Society Development Centre
Salomonkatu 17 A, 10th floor, FIN - 00100 HELSINKI, FINLAND
Phone: +358 9 4763 0397 Fax: +358 9 4763 0399
http://www.tieke.fi <EMAIL REMOVED>


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