Eric van der Vlist wrote: > I am struggling to implement the frame/colsep/rowsep control of HTML > tables in a DocBook like vocabulary in CSS.
First of all, note that support of XHTML tables in DocBook 4.3 will be implemented in V2.8p1 (We are in a hurry to release V2.8, and we unfortunately cannot spend time on this in V2.8). > The issue I have is that when colsep or rowsep are set to one, I need to > be able to override the values of the row or cell border control on the > edges depending of the value of the "frame" attribute. > > In other words, I need to be able to reverse the usual CSS inheritance > mechanism for tables. > > If I have understood the spec correctly, the border style "hidden" is > what CSS has imagined for this type of situations, unfortunately, this > value isn't supported by XXE. > > For simple cases (ie when colspan and rowspan are equal to one for each > cell in the table) I have found a workaround playing with transparent > border colors, but that doesn't work in the general case when rowspan or > colspan aren't always equal to one. > > Do you see any way to implement that in CSS without "style: hidden" (as > far as I understood, XXE supports that feature for DocBook through > Java)? > > Or is there any hope to get "style: hidden" implemented in a near > future? (May be I'll say stupid things in the email. If this is the case, please correct me. We have implemented table rendering a long time ago and I don't remember very well what we did and why we did it that way.) XXE only supports the separated borders model. That is, the only way to specify borders is to specify them around individual cells (i.e. not around rows, not around row groups). Adding a border on a specific side of a cell is achieved by specifying, for example, "border-bottom-color:black;" (this adds a line at the bottom of the cell). Suppressing a border on a specific side of a cell is achieved by specifying, for example, "border-top-color:transparent;" (this suppresses the line at the top of the cell). When the logic of specifying borders around cells becomes too complicated to be specified using pure CSS, you need to code a StyleSheetExtension in Java (see http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/docs/dev/ar01s07.html). This is what we have done for DocBook and XHTML (and for a custom schema implemented for one of our customers). Now, this being said, you can quickly and easily style tables using pure CSS without necessarily rendering all their visual attributes. Suffice to convince your users to accept the fact that, in that case, tables are not fully WYSIWYG in XXE.
