prince handles

div.whatever { display: table-cell; column-span: 2; }

just fine. safari, firefox, and mozilla all understand table-cell, but none of them understand column-span (nor -moz-column-span).

so, does anyone know of a browser that groks column-span? i really would prefer to take a look at a rough approximation of things before prince starts grinding...

thanks,

/mtr

You could always use <td colspan="2"> rather than using a <div> element and changing the display value, then browsers should handle it perfectly.

...then i have to change all the div's to td's, tr's, etc., because if i just change the div's with colspan<>1, it doesn't render right (at least on safari and firefox).

what i don't understand is why the browsers left off this one property and did all the rest...

/mtr

The browsers all started out as HTML-specific renderers, then gradually added support for CSS and XML. Being able to change the display of a given element is a relatively new development for them. Prince went the other way, starting out as a fully generic XML/CSS renderer, and then gradually adding support for legacy HTML parsing and presentational attributes. So sometimes there are things Prince does that browsers don't, and vice versa. The gap on both sides should narrow over time.

This is a serious implementation bug in PrinceXML. It should not be entertaining the code you are providing; the code, and the implementation supporting it, are in error.

The column-span property applies to the CSS3 columnated printing model, not to table cells. Table cells will never be spannable from css: the table's contents, including its cell layout, are semantic/data information, not formatting information. The purpose of CSS is to seperate content from formatting. You are attempting to control content from the formatting document.

This is one of the dangers of attempting to use tables to handle layout: people begin to confuse semantic and formatting concerns.

The defintion of column-span is here:

http://www.w3.org/1999/06/WD-css3-multicol-19990623

The CSS3 table specification is still working draft, meaning it is not publically accessable. I have it on good authority that no such styling element is in the specification, nor is such a styling element planned in the foreseeable future. The CSS2 table definition contains no such feature.

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/tables.html

Abandon all hope of acquiring semantic control in CSS. It will never, ever happen. The code that PrinceXML appears to support which browsers appear to not support is in fact incorrect. Browsers are correct to ignore any such request on the part of the author.

John Haugeland is http://fullof.bs/

The column-span and row-span properties will be renamed to table-column-span and table-row-span in the next release of Prince. The properties are used in Prince to implement the colspan and rowspan attributes in the default CSS style sheet for XHTML. They may also be used to present arbitrary XML elements in a tabular format, which may require some cells to span multiple columns or rows.

You name your other custom CSS elements prince-foo, in the fashion of mozilla-foo, which is highly desirable, so that people know they're playing with non-standard stuff. This thread would not have occurred had that naming convention continued.

I request that you attend your previous convention, and choose replacement terms which make obvious the proprietary nature of those features. I believe your earlier choice to annote such additions was a wise one which deserves continuance.

John Haugeland is http://fullof.bs/