RE: FN-FORUM: [CSS] Freezing thead

date posted 20th August 2003 20:11

George:
> Nick Grimshaw wrote:
> >>Do you have to use thead? It would work if things were in a div. The
> >>trouble with thead is that it will be anchored to the table it is part
> >>of.
> >
> > Congratulations, George! You've just earned a walloping with the
> > semantics-and-accessibility stick!
>
> OK well if you mean I should have told Ant not to use tables at all then
> yes I guess I deserve a wallop. Assuming that we can't throw all the
> lovely tables away I suppose the ideal recommendation would be to split
> the table and assign the top one an id and do it that way. Or have I
> missed the point on your stick nick?

Nope, wrong end of the... ermm.

The point is (and assuming Ant's data belongs in a table) that he's using
because (semantically speaking) he wants to identify the headers for
the columns of data in his table. So he almost certainly *wants it*
'anchored to the table it is part of', and shouldn't be splitting the
table.

The *ideal* solution would be something like this CSS being supported:
table {
height: (some percent);
}
thead, tfoot {
height: (some em)
}
tbody {
height: auto;
overflow: scroll;
}

... but of course this doesn't work in IE. (Or Gecko, actually).

- Nick Grimshaw
{ if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate. }