[imps] Table Inspector Bug

Lachlan Hunt lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au
Tue Sep 18 07:39:32 PDT 2007


(Resending to the correct mailing list address, sorry for the duplicate 
James)

Hi,
   There's a strange bug in the Table Inspector [1].  I discovered this 
bug while inspecting a table for a TV Guide [2].  When there's a comment 
inside a <th>, the associations between cells and headers gets messed 
up.  Compare the results of the following 2 tables.

In table 1, with the comment, using either the HTML4, HTML5 or 
Experemental algorithm:

* Cell A does not get associated with any headers
* Cell B is associated with headers X and ROW
* Cell C is associated with headers Y and ROW

In Table 2, without the comment, the cells are associated as expected.

* Cell A is associated with headers X and ROW
* Cell B is associated with headers Y and ROW
* Cell C is associated with headers Z and ROW

In both cases, the Smart Colspan algorithm behaves the same, except that 
it doesn't associate any cells with the header ROW.

Table 1:

<table>
   <tr>
     <th></th>
     <th>X</th>
     <th>Y</th>
     <th>Z</th>
   </tr>
   <tr>
     <th>ROW  <!--  comment  --></th>
     <td>A</td>
     <td>B</td>
     <td>C</td>
   </tr>
</table>


Table 2:

<table>
   <tr>
     <th></th>
     <th>X</th>
     <th>Y</th>
     <th>Z</th>
   </tr>
   <tr>
     <th>ROW</th>
     <td>A</td>
     <td>B</td>
     <td>C</td>
   </tr>
</table>

[1] http://james.html5.org/tables/table_inspector.html
[2] http://www.ebroadcast.com.au/tv/static/SydneyNight.html

(Note: unfortunately, that page uses so many layout tables and scripts 
to generate its content, it seems to overload the table inspector and is 
not possible to analyse the table directly. It works if you serialise 
the DOM from the browser and remove the noise, such as font and script 
elements, and irrelevant attributes.)

--
Lachlan  Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/







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