15431 - Odd inheritance of properties by table element content

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core :: CSS Parsing and Computation, defect, P3)

Description

[Ian Graham]

The referenced document assigns a bundle of text-related
properties to the body element, and tests to see what is inherited
by caption, th, and td elements.  The only property that is
inherited is color. Even there, this is only inherited by td/th
elements, and not by caption (which is rather confusing). I would
think both should inherit color, or neither.

I note that font-size/family are not inherited, probably for
consistency with Navigator 4.x.  I think this is a mistake, but
can understand the reason. And I'd stop here if there was an easy
way to override this behavior using CSS rules. However, there is
no obvious way to do so. I kinda _expected_ that CSS rules such
as:

table,caption,td,th,r {font-family: inherit; .... }

would override the default behavior and  allow inheritance of these
properties. But - this does not work. Indeed, the only way I can see
to get properties set for table content is to explicitly set
property values for td/th cells -- these properties are not inherited if
set for table or tr elements.

Is this the design choice -- or is this a bug? (M9 on Win 98)

Comment 1

[Peter Linss]

This is a backward compatibility design decision. Note that this behavior only
applies to HTML "quirk" mode. This does not apply when HTML 4.0 strict Doctype
is present or to XML.

Comment 2

[Christine Hoffman]

Verified WONTFIX