Menu
I often use THEAD, TBODY, and TFOOT elements to divide my data tables into sections that can be addressed separately with CSS. I also understand that there is always an implicit TBODY tag.
What puzzles me is the order that these have to go in to validate. THIS table will validate:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Table Validation Test</title> </head> <body> <table> <thead> <tr> <th scope="col">Enemies List</th> </tr> </thead> <tfoot> <tr> <td>© Bomb Voyage</td> </tr> </tfoot> <tbody> <tr> <td>Mr. Incredible</td> <td>Elastigirl</td> <td>Gazer Beam</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </body> </html> But this one will not:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>Table Validation Test</title> </head> <body> <table> <thead> <tr> <th scope="col">Enemies List</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Mr. Incredible</td> <td>Elastigirl</td> <td>Gazer Beam</td> </tr> </tbody> <tfoot> <tr> <td>© Bomb Voyage</td> </tr> </tfoot> </table> </body> </html> The valid one goes HEAD, FOOT, BODY; which does not make any sense.
Putting the foot at the bottom of the table would maintain the analogy between the table and a human body. But for some reason, this order is considered invalid.
Anyone know why?
775
The spec provides a reason:
TFOOT must appear before TBODY within a TABLE definition so that user agents can render the foot before receiving all of the (potentially numerous) rows of data.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/tables.html#h-11.2.3
I don't know if any browsers actually follow this behavior, and it was changed in HTML5 to handle both the HTML 4 order and the more logical order:
In this order: optionally a caption element, followed by zero or more colgroup elements, followed optionally by a thead element, followed optionally by a tfoot element, followed by either zero or more tbody elements or one or more tr elements, followed optionally by a tfoot element (but there can only be one tfoot element child in total).
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/tabular-data.html
94
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
