Re: Inheritance of column attributes
Benjamin C. W. Sittler (bsittler@mailhost.nmt.edu)
Wed, 24 Jan 1996 16:20:10 -0700 (MST)
For CSS to adequately express the COL/COLGROUP styling issue, it needs a
way to address the nth child of an element AND a general way to address
children of a mutual parent. A hierarchical scheme (similar, say, to
POSIX filenames) would be ideal, but it would require the browser to
store a full parse tree for the document. If you really want intelligent
table styling, use DSSSL (or DSSSL Online, if it suits your purposes.) I
doubt CSS (especially before level 3) will support this kind of thing.
I would be quite pleased if it did, of course.
Benjamin C. W. Sittler
P.S. How do browser authors feel about handling full parse trees? What's the
average performance penalty for actually parsing the document using
a true SGML parser? Any ideas on how to handle parsing before a document
is completely loaded? (Should heuristics based on existing HTML practice
be used, or is it simply too unknowable?)