Intent to Deprecate: hspace/vspace attributes on table

[Philip Jägenstedt]

Primary eng (and PM) emails

phi...@opera.com

Summary

Deprecate the hspace/vspace attributes on table, which are presentational attributes mapping to margin-left/right and margin-top/bottom respectively.

Motivation

There is a request to remove these from Simon Pieters:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=277080

As described in the bug, these attributes aren't supported at all in IE, and only in quirks mode in Gecko. The spec bug is waiting for someone to make the first move:

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=23039

Given the low usage, it seems worth trying.

Compatibility Risk

The margins around the table will be missing. This will likely not be catastrophic in most cases, but like any layout difference can be breaking.

Alternative implementation suggestion for web developers

Use CSS.

<table hspace="5"> => table { margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 5px; }

<table vspace="5"> => table { margin-top: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px; }

Usage information from UseCounter

vspace ~0.007%: http://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity/374

hspace ~0.005%: http://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity/375

Available in M38.

Entry on chromestatus.com, crbug.com, or MDN

None.

Requesting approval to remove too?

No, usage is low but still such that a deprecation message seems worthwhile.

[Philip Jägenstedt]

Correction: the use counters are available since M36, which has reached stable.

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

Let's try for it. LGTM.

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[Eric Seidel]

lgtm

[Dimitri Glazkov]

LGTM2

[Jochen Eisinger]

lgtm3