Re: Inheritance of column attributes

Hakon Lie (Hakon.Lie@sophia.inria.fr)
Thu, 25 Jan 1996 10:16:34 +0100


Scott E. Preece writes:

> ---
> | If you still think this should be supported, could you
> | suggest a scheme for handling multiple inheritance?
> ---
>
> I thought I had, in both previous notes: state in the standard that
> for purposes of inheritance of attributes and determining context
> for stylesheet-entry selection, a TH or TD is a descendant of both the
> TR in which it occurs and the COLGROUP and COL defining the column in
> which it occurs, with the COLGROUP and COL being considered more
> specific than the TR.

So you're not too interested in inheritance (i.e. the values that are
passed down the tree), but would like to do context sensitive
addressing based on COL and COLGROUP? E.g.:

COL.hilite TD { background: yellow }

which would win over:

TR.hilite TD { background: pink }

This makes sense. The question is how much it will complicate
implementations. Currently, CSS only require the parser/formatter to
keep one stack of open elements. Within tables, they would now have to
keep two stacks.

It would be trivial to make this change in the specification, and I'm
happy to so if initial implementors agree.

Regards,

-h&kon

Hakon W Lie, W3C/INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France
http://www.w3.org/People/howcome howcome@w3.org