141984 - Excel generated Table with columns hidden using display:none is rendered incorrectly

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Core :: Layout: Tables, defect, P3)

Description

[Dirk Steins]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0rc1)
Gecko/20020417
BuildID:    2002041711

The page above contains an Excel generated HTML table which has hidden columns
in it. This is done using 

<col width=0 style='display:none;'>

Mozilla ignores the width and display:none and shows the column anyway,
resulting in a very broken layout. 

Rendering mode is Quirks Mode.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to the page mentioned in the URL, see the broken table.
2. done.


Expected Results:  The table should be rendered correctly, not showing the
hidden columns.

I've isolated the reason for the bug and also build minimal test cases which i
will append after submission.

Comment 1

[Dirk Steins]

Attachment: Minimal test case showing the bug with a hidden column

Minimal HTML file showing the bug, containing a very small HTML table generated
with Excel 2000.

Comment 2

[Bernd]

The issue here is what should happen with <col style="display:none"> IE honours
this, mozilla does not, showing IMO another deficiency in the CSS2-spec with its
broken relationship to columns. This is not a dupe of bug 915. We should go and
ask w3c for clarification.

Comment 3

[karnaze (gone)]

mass reassign to default owner

Comment 4

[Eric Jain]

This issue still seems to be present in Firefox 1.5. It seems that other style attributes on a col element such as background-color are applied correctly, so I wonder if there is any good reason why display:none doesn't work? This functionality would be very useful for anyone who needs to implement show/hide column behavior in a web page.

Comment 5

[Eric Jain]

Attachment: Even more minimal test case

Comment 6

[Bernd]

Time goes by, another oppinion comes ...I think that the spec is clear there is no inheritance from cols to cells. Making a col display:none is rather an error with respect to the html spec requiring to have enough cols for the cells. To hide columns use visibility:collapse. Invalid IMHO.

Comment 7

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

display:none looks like it's working fine in these testcases.  If a col element has display:none, it's no longer a column in the CSS model, which requires that it be display:table-column.

This is pretty clearly invalid, and there's no way to fix this in an implementation of the CSS table model (which WinIE doesn't support).

Comment 8

[Eric Jain]

You're right, I guess what I was really looking for was visibility:collapse. This property of course isn't supported by Internet Explorer, and using both properties won't work here, either, the fun just never ends :-)