[whatwg] colspan="0"

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Nov 4, 2006, at 1:53 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>
> None of Opera 9.02, Firefox 2.0, IE7 and Safari 2.0.4 implement 
> colspan="0" as specified in HTML 4.01. Trident, Presto and WebKit at 
> least agree on what to do with it: they treat it like colspan="1".
>
> I suggest that only positive integers be conforming and that 
> non-conforming values be treated as 1.
> ...

I know browser vendors have had a long time to implement this, but 
still, I think giving up on it would be a shame. The number of rows or 
columns in a table is often rather expensive to calculate ahead of 
time. As long as this has to be done to calculate the rowspan= or 
colspan= of header cells, this can substantially increase the time an 
application takes to generate a table. For the browser to interpret 
colspan="0" or rowspan="0" instead would both make life easier for 
application authors, and make such pages faster overall.

-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/