Opera 7.23 and the COL element

[Boris]

Opera 7.23 handles the COL element (and especially the WIDTH attribute of
the COL element) differently than IE 6.0. I had a look into the HTML 4.01
specification and I am not sure who is right and who is wrong or if the
specification allows both interpretations.

Open http://www.highscore.de/ in Opera 7.23 and IE 6.0. You will notice a
table basically with three columns. The left and the right column contain an
image while there is only text in the middle column. The table uses a
COLGROUP element which looks like this:

<colgroup>
<col width="150">
<col>
<col width="150">
</colgroup>

While in IE 6.0 the outside columns are in fact only 150 pixels wide Opera
7.23 enhances the width of the left column to more than 150 pixels.

As I said I looked up the HTML specification. As far as I can see
width="150" really means that the browser has to use a width of 150 pixels -
nothing more, nothing less. After looking around some more I found this:

"If column widths prove to be too narrow for the contents of a particular
table cell, user agents may choose to reflow the table." (
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/tables.html#h-11.2.4.4 )

However as IE 6.0 proves the width of the left column at
http://www.highscore.de/ is not too narrow so is this a bug in Opera 7.23 or
why is the width of the left column wider than specified in the HTML markup
of the page?

Boris

[Rijk van Geijtenbeek]

If you remove the nested table with 'width=100%' from the left column, the
col widths will work fine. This might be considered a bug.

--
The Web is a procrastination apparatus: | Rijk van Geijtenbeek
It can absorb as much time as | Documentation & QA
is required to ensure that you | mailto:ri...@opera.com
won't get any real work done. - J.Nielsen

[Boris]

"Rijk van Geijtenbeek" <ri...@opera.com>,
news:oprz9sab...@news.opera.com...

> On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 22:56:59 +0100, Boris <bo...@gtemail.net> wrote:
>

> [...]

> > However as IE 6.0 proves the width of the left column at
> > http://www.highscore.de/ is not too narrow so is this a bug in Opera
> > 7.23 or why is the width of the left column wider than specified in the
> > HTML markup of the page?
>
> If you remove the nested table with 'width=100%' from the left column, the
> col widths will work fine. This might be considered a bug.

I filed a bug report (bug #133382).

Boris