2012-07-11 12:49, River John wrote:
I think that the "width" attribute for td, th and table elements is
very useful, and should not be as the attributes that will "Not
supported in HTML5".
It is presentational, and the policy is to declare such attribute as
obsolete, see
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/introduction.html#presentational-markup,
Not everyone agrees with this ideology - and none of the reasons listed
in the cited document really applies to the case you describe, or many
other cases -, but I think it's unrealistic to try to change it now,
unless you can come up with *very* strong arguments about some special
cases.
Note that the attribute is declared obsolete but still to remain in the
spec, with description of its meaning, and browsers are required to
support it, and will undoubtedly do so; see
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/infrastructure.html#conformance-classes
The only real problem, to people who wish to keep using presentational
attributes, is that conformance checkers will issue error messages. This
can make it more difficult to distinguish real errors from a long list
of messages. But I suppose someone will some day create a conformance
checker that has the option of switching off the "ideological"
messages.The benefits to do this:
1. We can specify the width of columns in a table immediately and simply.
2. Need not write CSS for each table and each column.
3. Need not add the class attributes to these elements in order to
applying the CSS
Considering some old browsers, it is true that class attributes would be
needed in some situations, but nowadays support to selectors like
:nth-child(...) are rather widespread. You may still need to use id or
class attributes for <table> elements to have different styling for
different tables, unless you prefer using style="..." attributes.
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
