If you cannot enable this feature from a stylesheet, then how will you
enable it without hard coding the table format into the rendering
engine? Someone else pointed out that spreadsheets do basically what
is proposed as a way of refuting my statement that implementing this
would be hard.
However, there is one point missed here: Given that SGML *is* coming
to the WWW (like it or not), and that people want arbitrarily complex
tables (or will do eventually), what does "header" and "footer" mean?
Also, is this meaningful on a scrolled page? I can imagine people
wishing to have something like a "scrolled table view" widget embedded
in a document to cut down the amount of space required for the table;
I'll even admit that it might be useful for large tables, but it is
certainly not an HTML issue.
Personally, I agree with Eric Nuggum and think that tables don't
exist anyway :-)