[whatwg] overflow:auto in tbody

Luis Miguel Reis luis.reis at netcabo.pt
Sat Nov 13 02:22:34 PST 2004


Hi,

On the first mozilla milestones, there was a demo of a table element 
featuring a tbody with scrollbars. I've always wanted to use this 
feature, but, IE doesn't support it at all and mozilla/firefox history 
of supporting this has had some minor/major bugs, eg, cell borders fixed 
while cell contents moved by scrollbars. Anyway, this mail is not about 
browser bugs.

What I haven't seen so far was the definition of wath happens to table 
headers when the scrollbar appears. This leads to extra cells on the 
table headers, just to "fill the gap". Let me exemplify:

Normal behaviour:

Normal table, sans scrollbars:
+-----------------------+
| head1 | head2 | head3 |
+-----------------------+
| data  |  data |  data |
| data  |  data |  data |
| data  |  data |  data |
| data  |  data |  data |
+-----------------------+

Same table with current scrollbar implementation:
+-----------------------+
| head1 | head2 | head3 |
+-----------------------+
| data  |  data | d...|^|
| data  |  data | d...| |
| data  |  data | d...|v|
+---------------------+-+

"Good looking" scrollbar implementation:
+------------------------+
| head1 | head2 | head3| |
+------------------------+
| data  |  data | data |^|
| data  |  data | data | |
| data  |  data | data |v|
+----------------------+-+

The same reasoning can be applied to horizontal scrollbars.

Can the WebForm spec include a section that defines the third behaviour 
explicitly (the spacer introducer in the header) ?

Using tables with scroolbars like these would also benefit from size 
units(?) dependent on screen size, but that's another story (which I 
think makes sense in WebForms more than in general HTML).

Best Regards,
Thank you for your time,
Luis Reis



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