Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 08/23/05 01:37

Neredbojias <neredbojias@neredbojias.com> wrote:

> With neither quill nor qualm, JohnW quothed:
>
>> BTW, I am enjoying this Usenet - finally found people to talk to about
>> HTML, CSS, etc. I'm single, retired (no office compatriots) and
>> maintain web sites for non-profits - none of my friends have any idea
>> of what I'm talking about in the web world! {g}
>
> You're lucky. None of my friends know what I'm talking about ever.

What's this "friend" thing I keep hearing about?

I have a strange feeling that to obtain and especially to maintain a
"friend", I would have to refrain from talking about HTML, CSS, or the web
at all in the presence of the said "friend". This makes the usefulness of a
"friend" (not to mention multiple copies of "friend"!) highly questionable.
Besides, rumors claim that many a "friend" actually carries viruses!

(There are many other questions I'd like to ask about, like "money",
"vacation", and "sleep", but right now I'm mostly puzzled by the
question why some people seem to spell "SOAP" in all lowercase.)

Returning to the original question, the short answer is "no". There's no
decent way to fool IE into creating a nicely-printable or scrollable table
the way we are supposed to be able to do with <tbody> and friends together
with some nice cool CSS. It's possible to do something dirty on screen by
using e.g. iframe or object with suitable attributes for the table data and
some construct like a single-row table above the scrollable area. But
making the columns line up is just too awkward when you have two separate
tables. (Setting widths in pixels is a problem, not a solution.)

Anyway, there's a old test or demo
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/iframe.html#sim-thead
which hopefully illustrates what I was talking about.

To be honest, even to IE, I have to admit that IE understands _some_ of the
advanced table markup that was added to HTML recently (in 1997). IE even
renders <tfoot> below the <tbody> as required, even when <tfoot> appears
before <tbody> in markup as it should by the spec. IE even lets you style a
<tbody> element. And IE supports the scrolling-related properties in CSS to
some extent, so that you can make a <div> element scrollable. But it
refuses to support them for <tbody>, which is what we really wanted and
needed.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

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