I recently read Dave Raggert's recent HTML Tables internet draft [1], and
noticed something:
Tables can contain a wide range of content, such as headers, lists,
paragraphs, forms, figures, preformatted text and even nested
tables. When the table is flush left or right, subsequent elements
will be flowed around the table if there is sufficient room. This
behaviour is disabled when the noflow attribute is given or the
table align attribute is center (the default), or justify.
This paragraph implies that tables can be aligned, and even makes
reference to a "table align attribute". However... nowhere in the text
specification or in the DTD itself is there an align attribute for the
TABLE tag. The HTML 3.0 draft [2]'s tables section [3] had such an animal,
which could accept BLEEDLEFT, LEFT, CENTER, RIGHT, BLEEDRIGHT or JUSTIFY,
and the paragraph quoted above seems to indicate the same. But it doesn't
seem to exist in the new i-d.
Is this an oversight, or has the attribute been left out for some other
reason? Certainly stylesheets can be used to provide this capability, but
tables seem intended as a peer to paragraphs and figures, both of with can
be aligned with an align attribute. (well, in the HTML 3.0 draft at least.
And many modern browsers do support the align attribute on the P and
header tags.) Besides, this seems an unlikely justification, as the draft
allows for cells, rows and columns to be aligned with attributes.
Am I missing something? The rest of the draft looks very good. Just this
one point.
[1] http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html3-tables/tables.txt
[2] http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html3/CoverPage.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html3/tables.html
--/ Alexei Kosut <akosut@nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us> /--------/ Lefler on IRC
----------------------------/ <http://www.nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us/~akosut/>
The viewpoints expressed above are entirely false, and in no way
represent Alexei Kosut nor any other person or entity. /--------------